Ten Nobels for the future

Martin Rodbell was born in 1925 in Baltimore, Maryland, where he attended public schools and graduated from the accelerated course at Baltimore City College. He entered Johns Hopkins University in 1943 and was then drafted into the Navy. "As a Jew, fighting Hitler was my highest priority. However, I spent most of the time in the South Pacific where the fighting was with the Japanese".

When he returned from the war and re-entered Johns Hopkins, he was attracted to French literature and existentialist philosophy. The turning point was a small class given by James Ebert, then a graduate student in the Biology Department. Lengthy discourses on science philosophy and his deep interest and knowledge of embryology along with his enthusiasm for biology in general induced Martin Rodbell to consider a career in the biological sciences. After graduating from Johns Hopkins, in 1954 he received his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Washington.

He became a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois, where he took on the research problem of the biosynthesis of chloramphenicol. Since 1956 he has worked at NIH, first in the National Heart Institute, where he studied protein chemistry. In 1960 he returned to his initial interest in cell biology: embryology, and after a fellowship at the Free University of Brussels he was given a position in the Laboratory of Nutrition and Endocrinology, at the Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, where his research on G proteins was done.

In 1970 Martin Rodbell discovered that signal transmission requires a cellular molecule called GTP. In 1977 Alfred Gilman identified the proteins to which GTP binds and named them G proteins. In 1994 they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine "for their discovery of G proteins and their role in signal transduction in cells". The impact of this discovery has been enormous because identification of the G proteins and understanding of how they function is essential to basic biomedical research.

G proteins are a family of proteins that bind to the cell surface membrane and serve as intermediaries between incoming signals, such as some hormones and drugs, and the cellular proteins that respond to these signals. They have been shown to play many roles in normal cellular function, including cell growth and neurotransmission. More than 300 receptors are known to interact with G proteins, and aberrations in the function of what Rodbell called these "communication devices" underlie a variety of disease states, from cancer to cholera.

Martin Rodbell joined the National Institute of Health and Environmental Sciences (NIEHS) in 1985 and served as scientific director until 1989. He has functioned since 1989 as chief of the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology and is the Institute’s first scientist emeritus.

Martin Rodbell is highly regarded by his fellow scientists not only for his work, which has resulted in over 100 publications in the highest quality scientific journals, but also for the training and direction he has provided to emerging scientists throughout his carreer. It is through his leadership and tutelage that Rodbell has attempted to foster in young researchers what many regard as his most exemplary quality as a scientist: his ability to think creatively and to translate the creative thought into meaningful scientific discovery. "I was given the privilege to think for myself, to be an iconoclast", Rodbell says, "but science is a synergy of effort, it comes out from a kind of symbiosis between individuals. [...] We should be able, together, to bring about a better world, a world that we, as humans, can be proud of".

1997
For unexpected
achievements,
ask the iconoclast
and the unfettered mind