- Person
- Randy Schekman
- Lived
- b. 1948
- Field
- Cell biology
- From
- American
The story
Randy Schekman grew up in a Jewish family in Minneapolis, the grandson of immigrants from the Russian Empire and Bessarabia, and fell in love with microbes through a microscope he bought at a pawnshop as a teenager. In 1976 he joined the University of California, Berkeley, with a question few people thought could be answered: how does a cell package the proteins it makes and send them out into the world?
He chose baker’s yeast because a single-celled organism could be studied with the tools of genetics. With his graduate student Peter Novick he hunted for mutant yeast that could not secrete properly. In these mutants the cell’s internal transport jammed, and proteins and the tiny membrane bubbles that carry them piled up inside, like cargo in a port where the trucks have stopped. By 1980 the laboratory had identified 23 genes, the sec genes, and worked out which step of the export journey each one controls. Some of them proved to code for the same machinery that James Rothman found in mammals, revealing a system shared by all complex life. Schekman, Rothman and Thomas Südhof shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The discovery had immediate practical value. Once scientists understood how yeast secretes proteins, they could engineer it to make and release human proteins in large fermentation tanks. For about 20 years Schekman consulted for Chiron Corporation in Emeryville, California, which developed yeast-based systems to produce human insulin and the hepatitis B vaccine. According to the University of California, Berkeley, a large share of the insulin used by people with diabetes worldwide is produced by yeast, and the world’s supply of hepatitis B vaccine comes from yeast. Because chronic hepatitis B infection is a leading cause of liver cancer, the vaccine also prevents cancer.
Schekman donated his Nobel Prize money to endow a chair in cancer research at Berkeley in memory of his mother and his sister, who both died of cancer.
Why it matters
Schekman’s sec genes helped industry turn yeast into factories for human insulin and hepatitis B vaccine, medicines used by millions of people around the world.
About Randy Schekman
Berkeley cell biologist who found the genes that run the cell’s export system, knowledge used to make insulin and hepatitis B vaccine in yeast; a champion of open-access science.
Sources
- Randy Schekman awarded 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine UC Berkeley News
- Profile of Peter Novick PNAS (PubMed Central)
- Randy W. Schekman, Biographical NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.