Paul Greengard


Greengard, Paul,

1925–2019, American neuroscientist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1953. Greengard was on the staff at Geigy Research Laboratories (1959–67) and a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1961–70) and Yale (1968–83). In 1983 he became a professor at Rockefeller Univ., where he was director of the Fisher Center for Alzheimer's Disease Research from 1995. Greengard shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Arvid CarlssonCarlsson, Arvid,
1923–2018, Swedish pharmacologist, grad. Univ. of Lund, Sweden, (M.D., Ph.D., 1951). Carlsson was a professor at the Univ. of Lund (1951–59) and at the Univ. of Gothenburg, Sweden (1959–89).
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 and Eric KandelKandel, Eric Richard,
1929–, American neurobiologist, b., Vienna, Austria, M.D. New York Univ., 1956. Kandel was at the Harvard Medical School (1960–65) and New York Univ. (1965–74) before joining the faculty at Columbia in 1974.
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 for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. Greengard's contribution to the work was his discovery of the mechanism by which dopaminedopamine
, one of the intermediate substances in the biosynthesis of epinephrine and norepinephrine. See catecholamine.
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 and several other neurotransmittersneurotransmitter,
chemical that transmits information across the junction (synapse) that separates one nerve cell (neuron) from another nerve cell or a muscle. Neurotransmitters are stored in the nerve cell's bulbous end (axon).
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 carry messages between nerve cells. His findings contributed to an improved understanding of how several drugs work in the body. He later studied the defects in cell signaling involved in such disorders as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.