James Rothman
James Edward Rothman ( born November 3, 1950 in Haverhill, Massachusetts) is an American biochemist and professor at Yale University. 2013 was awarded to him together with Randy Schekman and Thomas Südhof the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Life
Rothman earned a bachelor's degree in 1971 from Yale College. He initially enrolled at Harvard University for medicine, but earned a Ph.D. there in 1976 at the Department of Biochemistry. Then he had a job as a post-doctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An Assistant Professor of Biochemistry ( assistant professor in 1978, associate professor in 1981 ) received Rothman at Stanford University in Stanford, California, in 1984 a full professorship. In 1988 he became a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1991 he took over the management of the program of cellular biochemistry and biophysics at the Sloan- Kettering Institute of the Memorial Sloan -Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and a chair of the same name. In 2004 he became professor of physiology and cellular biophysics at Columbia University, New York and director of the Centre for Chemical Biology. In 2008 he became Professor of Biomedical Sciences at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Work
Rothman described the mechanism of intracellular membrane fusion. He made the important discovery that cells contain very small vesicles that are equipped with biomembranes and carry very different proteins between cellular compartments. This transport process, which includes processes of Vesikelflusses and membrane fusion, is crucial for cell growth and division. Rothman showed that the specificity of membrane fusion by the pairing of certain proteins - the SNARE proteins - between biomembranes depends. This discovery has numerous physiological processes could be explained consistently, including the release of insulin, the communication of nerve cells and the infection of cells with viruses such as HIV. Disturbances in the control of these membrane fusion processes play an important role in the pathophysiology of diabetes mellitus and probably also certain types of cancer. Fusion inhibitors are among the most recent drugs, using their infection with the HIV virus should be ruled by interfering with membrane fusion.