Greengard, Paul

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 Carlsson and Eric Kandel for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. Greengard's contribution to the work was his discovery of the mechanism by which dopamine and several other neurotransmitters 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.

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