Paul Greengard
Paul Greengard ( born December 11, 1925 in New York City ) is an American biochemist and pharmacologist. In 2000, he shared with the Swede Arvid Carlsson and Eric Richard Kandel the Americans the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1991 he was awarded the NAS Award in the Neurosciences.
Life and work
Paul Greengard received his doctorate in 1953 as a biochemist and went in 1959 to the Geigy Research Laboratories in Ardsley. He was appointed as a professor at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven in 1968, where he was a professor of pharmacology and psychiatry. In 1983 he was a professor at the Rockefeller University in New York, where he also the Head of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience took over. Throughout his academic career researching and teaching Greengard also at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Vanderbilt University.
Greengard conducted research mainly on the signal transmission between nerve cells in the brain, to examine the specific mediation by intercellular signaling molecules. He explained to mainly transfer to the so-called slow synapses are determined by the basic functions of the central nervous system, such as mood or alertness. He discovered that the dopamine signal a cascade of reactions inside the nerve cell triggers that leads in addition to the modification of cellular proteins also different to the opening of ion channels. Characterized by the penetrating ions, the electric charge of the cell is reversed, whereby action potentials are triggered.
The findings on the signal transmission and the effect of signal substances are mainly for the use of drugs is important. In particular, the mode of action of psychotropic drugs, such as for schizophrenia, can be better understood and analyzed.
He is the father of the mathematician Leslie Greengard.
In 1994 he received the Ralph W. Gerard Prize -.