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Paul Greengard, an American neuroscientist whose 15 years of research on brain cell communication has led to a better understanding of psychological illnesses and has earned him a Nobel Prize. He also used his $ 400,000 prize to create an academic prize in memory of his mother. , died Saturday in Manhattan. He was 93 years old.
His death was confirmed by Rockefeller University, where he worked since 1983.
Dr. Greengard received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Drs Arvid Carlsson of Sweden and Eric R. Kandel of the United States for their independent discoveries on how brain cells transmit messages on movement, memory and mental states. Their discoveries have led to a better understanding of disorders related to cellular communication errors, such as Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and substance abuse.
Dr. Greengard's research has described the cells' reaction to dopamine, an important chemical messenger in the brain. His work has provided the science behind many antipsychotic drugs that modulate the strength of chemical signals in the brain.
"Our work shows in detail how dopamine produces these effects – in other words, what's wrong with these diseases and what can be done to correct them," said Dr. Greengard.
Greengard's research spanned from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. For most of the period, his work was ignored. A majority of biologists believed that brain cells communicated through the use of electrical signals. For them, the only thing that mattered was whether a cell was sending a signal.
"At one point, I thought that they would not be accepted in my lifetime," Dr. Greengard said in an interview in 2011, referring to the results of his many experiments.
In the end, Mr. Greengard showed that electrical and chemical signaling worked in tandem. He discovered that the chemical groups called phosphates in cells trigger a cascade of chemical modifications that amplify the signal of dopamine. This response, in turn, allows cells to trigger electrical signals. Today, the field that he initiated, called signal transduction, is an important area of study.
Paul Greengard was born on December 11, 1925 in Brooklyn. His father was a vaudeville artist who became a perfume salesman; his mother, a housewife, died while giving birth to him. When Dr. Greengard was 13 months old, his father, who was Jewish, married an episcopal who had raised Dr. Greengard and his two sisters in the Christian tradition. He was not aware of his mother until she entered college. he needed information on his family history to fill out a form.
He deeply felt the loss of his mother. he had no memory of it, not even a photo. After receiving the Nobel Prize, he used his $ 400,000 prize to create the Pearl Meister Greengard Award for Women in Biomedical Research, in honor of his mother.
"Since there was no material evidence of my mother's existence, I wanted to do something to make it less abstract," he told the New York Times in 2006.
He attended public schools in Brooklyn and Queens after graduating from Forest Hills High School. He enlisted in the Navy, who sent him to an electronics technician school, and then assigned him to a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was working on a radar system. Early warning to protect US ships during World War II.
After his military service, he went to Hamilton College, a small liberal arts college in Clinton, New York, where he specialized in physics and mathematics. His father and his mother-in-law did not want him to go to university – "They were both very anti-intellectual," he told an interviewer – but the GI Bill has covered his tuition. He graduated in 1948 and was planning to pursue graduate studies.
He was attracted to theoretical physics, but was preoccupied with carrying out research that could contribute to the development of nuclear weapons, an emerging field of post-war research. "I thought there were better ways to spend my life than trying to destroy humanity," he said.
He has entered the nascent field of biophysics, which uses mathematics and physics to solve biological problems. Although most biophysicists study electrical signaling in nerve cells, he chose to study chemical signaling, believing that it would be easier to leave a mark in a less developed area.
Dr. Greengard earned his doctorate in 1953 from Johns Hopkins University, one of the few institutions to offer a degree in biophysics at the time. After five years of postdoctoral work and a stint in the pharmaceutical industry, he joined the faculty of Yale University in 1968. He moved to Rockefeller University in 1983 and moved there. the rest of his career.
Toward the end of her life, her research focused on understanding abnormalities in cell signaling of specific disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and depression.
Dr. Greengard has been married three times and divorced twice. The survivors include his wife, the sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard; three children, Claude Greengard, Leslie Greengard and Ursula Anne von Rydingsvard; a sister, Linda Greengard; and six grandchildren.
Before going to Yale, Dr. Greengard spent several months at Vanderbilt University, where he worked with Dr. Earl Sutherland Jr., a prominent biochemist. Dr. Sutherland had made some important discoveries about chemical signaling in fat and muscle cells in response to messages from hormones; he was then awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work.
Dr. Sutherland's research drew Dr. Greengard's curiosity. Is the type of chemical signaling seen in fat and muscle cells also in brain cells?
"No one was really interested – it was not ready for prime time," said Dr. Greengard, recalling reactions to his ideas in a 2000 interview with the New York Times. "People have said," Poor Paul, I am sure he will find the way that suits him. "
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