Alfred Gilman - Definition

Alfred Goodman Gilman (b. July 1, 1941) is an American scientist. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Martin Rodbell for their discoveries regarding G-proteins.

G-proteins are a vital intermediary between the activation of receptors on the cell membrane and actions within the cell. Rodbell had shown in the 1960s that GTP was involved in cell signaling. It was Gilman who actually discovered the protiens that interacted with the GTP to initiate signalling cascades within the cell.

Gilman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Alfred Gilman, was a professor at Yale University. He gave his son the middle name Goodman in honor of his co-author on a pharmacology textbook, Louis Goodman. Gilman graduated from Yale with his B.S. in 1962. He then entered a M.D.-Ph.D. program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where he studied under Nobel laurate Earl Sutherland. Gilman graduated from Case Western in 1969, then did his post-doctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health with Nobel laurate Marshall Nirenberg from 1969 until 1971. In 1971 Dr. Gilman became a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1981, he beame chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. He was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1987.

External links

Nobel Prize Autobiography (http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1994/gilman-autobio.html)