A Jewish childhood in Minnesota
Randy Wayne Schekman was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on December 30, 1948. His father’s father had come to the United States from the Russian Empire, served with a British brigade in Palestine and settled among the Jews of the Twin Cities. His mother’s parents came from a village in Bessarabia, now Moldova; his grandfather was a tailor who won a lottery to emigrate in 1927, and most of the family left behind were killed when the Nazis overran Eastern Europe. Randy was named after his grandmother Rose, and his Hebrew name is Ruvain.
He grew up on the north side of Minneapolis, then a neighbourhood of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, close to his grandparents. Life revolved around cousins, school at the Jewish community centre, afternoon Hebrew lessons, Friday-night Sabbath dinners at his grandparents’ home and holidays at their Conservative synagogue. He lived almost entirely among Jewish families and first met antisemitism when an older boy punched him in the stomach on learning he was headed to the Jewish community centre. His father, Alfred, was an engineer; his mother, Esther, had not been able to attend college.
A pawnshop microscope
In 1959 the family moved to Southern California, where his father found work in the young computer industry, settling in Rossmoor in Orange County. Randy listened to the Los Angeles Dodgers on the radio and idolised the Jewish pitcher Sandy Koufax. A toy microscope and a jar of pond water opened the microbial world to him, and the junior high school science fair became his passion. He saved money from babysitting, mowing lawns and a paper route to buy a real microscope, but his mother kept borrowing it for household expenses. One day, in frustration, he rode his bicycle to the police station and announced that he wanted to run away from home. His father was called in, and that afternoon they bought the microscope at a pawnshop in Long Beach. It is now on display at the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm.
With help from a family friend who worked in a hospital laboratory, he grew bacteria at home in a homemade incubator, using his mother’s pressure cooker to sterilise the growth medium, and won a place at the California State Science Fair.
Learning from the masters
Schekman studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1966, spending a year at the University of Edinburgh, and was captivated by James Watson’s textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene. His final year was overshadowed by tragedy: his younger sister Wendy was diagnosed with acute leukaemia and died within months, a loss he says has never left him. He earned his BA in 1971 and went to Stanford University to study DNA replication with the Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg, completing his PhD in 1975.
At Stanford he felt out of place among students from elite private universities; when Kornberg asked why he had not gone to a better school, he replied that UCLA was what his family could afford. He has since become a strong champion of public universities. It was also at Stanford that a friend introduced him to Nancy Walls, a nurse, whom he married in 1973. After a postdoctoral fellowship in San Diego, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976, where he has remained ever since.
His years with Kornberg were demanding; he recalls intense and sometimes acrimonious arguments with his mentor, and a period when he was put in a small laboratory room on his own as penance for obnoxious behaviour. A friendship with the postdoctoral fellow Bill Wickner helped him settle down. He left, he says, with the intellectual and technical skills that made the rest of his career possible, and Kornberg and his wife Sylvie attended Randy and Nancy’s outdoor wedding in Huddart Park, near Stanford.
Traffic jams in yeast
At Berkeley Schekman asked how cells export proteins: how a hormone or enzyme made inside a cell is packaged, moved through a series of internal compartments and finally released. He chose baker’s yeast, a single cell that can be studied with the powerful tools of genetics. With his student Peter Novick he searched for mutant yeast that could not secrete properly. In these mutants, the cell’s transport system jammed: proteins and the tiny membrane bubbles that carry them piled up inside the cell, like goods in a port where the trucks no longer run.
By 1980 the laboratory had found 23 genes, which he named sec genes, and sorted them into groups that control different steps of the journey: leaving the endoplasmic reticulum, passing through the Golgi apparatus, and fusing with the cell’s outer membrane. His team then rebuilt these steps in the test tube, discovered the protein complex that moves new proteins into the endoplasmic reticulum, and found COPII, the protein coat that shapes the first transport vesicles. Some of his yeast genes turned out to code for the same machinery that James Rothman had found in mammals, showing that this export system is shared by all complex life.
From yeast to medicine
Schekman’s discoveries had a direct and very practical payoff. By understanding how yeast secretes proteins, the biotechnology industry learned how to make yeast produce and release human proteins. For about 20 years Schekman consulted for Chiron Corporation in Emeryville, California, which developed yeast-based systems to make human insulin and the hepatitis B vaccine. According to the University of California, Berkeley, diabetics around the world use insulin produced and secreted by yeast, and most of the world’s hepatitis B vaccine is made the same way. Because hepatitis B is a major cause of liver cancer, that vaccine also prevents many cancers.
The machinery he described is also at the heart of nerve signalling, hormone secretion, cholesterol balance and metabolism, and faults in it are linked to diabetes and neurological and immune disorders. He shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas Südhof. He donated his share of the prize money to endow the Esther and Wendy Schekman Chair in Basic Cancer Biology at Berkeley, named for his mother and sister, who both died of cancer.
Opening up science
Schekman has used his standing to change how science is shared. He served as editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in 2011 was named founding editor of eLife, an open-access journal backed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust, in which anyone can read published research free of charge. In December 2013, the week he received the Nobel Prize, he announced that his laboratory would no longer submit papers to Nature, Cell and Science, arguing that the pursuit of publication in these so-called luxury journals distorted science and rewarded fashionable results over important ones. He has argued that such journals artificially limit the number of papers they accept to drive up demand, favour work likely to be cited often rather than work that is important, and so tempt scientists to cut corners or chase trends.
He has also praised the change he watched over forty years in the place of women in science, naming the many women whose work in his laboratory and department proved central to its discoveries.
Fighting Parkinson’s disease
When she was 48, Nancy Schekman was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Deep brain stimulation surgery in 2009 eased her physical symptoms, but she later developed dementia from a related condition, diffuse Lewy body disease, for which there is no effective treatment. She died in 2017 after some twenty years of illness. Near the end of that period Schekman became scientific director of Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s, or ASAP, an international programme working with The Michael J. Fox Foundation to understand how the disease begins and progresses. By 2022 it involved 35 teams across 165 laboratories worldwide, and it requires its researchers to share their findings openly.
Family and legacy
Schekman and Nancy had two children: Joel, a clarinettist who became a professional orchestral musician, and Lauren, who works in business and sings in a semi-professional choir. He has described himself as not religious but deeply grateful for the people and opportunities in his life. In recent years he has also worked with scientists in Moldova, the land of his maternal grandparents, whose Academy of Sciences made him an honorary member in 2021.
His mother, Esther, who had watched every award ceremony and expected to go to Stockholm one day, died of a brain tumour in 1998 at 69. His father, Alfred, later remarried and lived to see his son’s Nobel lecture, where Schekman asked him to stand before an audience of a thousand people to receive his thanks. Schekman received the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize with James Rothman in 2002, and he has served on the selection committee of the Shaw Prize.
His legacy runs from the laboratory bench to the pharmacy: a map of the genes that let every cell send its products into the world, a manufacturing method that supplies insulin and hepatitis B vaccine to millions, and a sustained campaign to make the results of science freely available to everyone.
Sources & further reading
Randy W. Schekman, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Randy Schekman awarded 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, UC Berkeley News · Schekman and Rothman share Lasker Award, UC Berkeley News, 2002 · Sandeep Ravindran, Profile of Peter Novick, PNAS, 2013 · Randy Schekman, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.