THE LEDGER-STAR
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 11, 1994 TAG: 9410110441
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
The two winners of this year's Nobel Prize in medicine both have close ties to Virginia.
Dr. Alfred G. Gilman of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas conducted the research cited by the Nobel Committee when he was a faculty member in the pharmacology department at the University of Virginia's medical school from 1971 to 1981.
Dr. Martin Rodbell, recently retired from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at Research Triangle Park, N.C., is an affiliate professor in Virginia Commonwealth University's department of pharmacology and toxicology. He visits VCU's Medical College of Virginia campus each spring to lecture and work with graduate students in the department.
Gilman and Rodbell will split the $930,000 prize for discovering the first of a series of proteins that translate hormone signals into specific events inside cells. Scientists knew for some time that cells communicate with one another by means of hormones and other substances, but they didn't know how those substances led to actions inside cells.
Gilman and Rodbell discovered proteins that essentially carry the message from hormones on the outside of the cell to within the cell.
Their discoveries, products of two decades of work, were the key in helping scientists understand diseases that affect tens of millions of people around the globe, said Professor Bertil Fredholm of the Karolinska Institute's Nobel Assembly.
While their research has not netted treatments yet, the institute said it ultimately might.
Dr. James C. Garrison, chairman of U.Va.'s pharmacology department and a friend and colleague of Gilman when he was at the university, said that Gilman's basic work leading to the Nobel Prize was carried out when he was at U.Va.
Gilman outlined the characteristics of a protein that would transmit and modulate signals in cells, Garrison said. Also, ``he purified this protein and showed how it works.''
Rodbell's association with the MCV pharmacology department came about through its chairman, Dr. George Kunos, who knows Rodbell from their association at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Kunos had worked at NIH before his appointment at MCV.
Kunos said Monday that when he became chairman of VCU's pharmacology department about two years ago, he invited Rodbell to become an affiliated member of the department.
``He said he missed the academic environment and would be happy to participate in the teaching of graduate students,'' Kunos said. by CNB