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标题: Julius Axelrod Dies at 92; Won Nobel in Medici
发信站: 荔园晨风BBS站 (2004年12月31日20:22:55 星期五), 站内信件

Julius Axelrod Dies at 92; Won Nobel in Medicine
By DAVID TULLER

Published: December 31, 2004

Julius Axelrod, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped to discover how
chemicals released by nerve cells in the brain regulate mood and behavior,
died on Wednesday at his home in Rockville, Md., the National Institute of
Mental Health, where he worked for most of his career, said. He was 92.

Dr. Axelrod shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two
other scientists, Dr. Bernard Katz of Britain and Prof. Ulf von Euler of
Sweden. Their work was essential to the development of psychiatric drugs and
others and led directly to the development of selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors, the class of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Zoloft and
Paxil.

The Nobel Foundation cited the men "for their discoveries concerning the
transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage,
release and inactivation." But Dr. Axelrod's influence extended far beyond
the discoveries related to the prize.

In the 1940's, even before receiving his doctorate in pharmacology, Dr.
Axelrod played a major role in identifying acetaminophen as the
pain-relieving chemical in a common headache treatment of the day.

The newly discovered substance was later developed and marketed by Johnson &
Johnson under the brand name Tylenol. Dr. Axelrod also helped to discover an
enzyme system essential for metabolizing drugs in the liver, the hormone
melatonin, and other critical biochemical processes and substances.

"His contributions to pharmacology, especially in terms of how drugs act in
the brain, were extraordinary," said Dr. Solomon Snyder, the director of the
neuroscience department at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
and a longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Axelrod.

"In fact, the work for which he got the Nobel Prize was just a tiny
percentage of his scientific output," Dr. Snyder said. "He had the gift of
figuring out simple ways of measuring things. He could have a rack of 20 test
tubes, do an experiment and answer five important questions by lunchtime."

In a statement, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of
Health in Bethesda, Md., said "countless millions of individuals" benefited
daily from medications that Dr. Axelrod's insights made possible.

"Our understanding of the biological basis of human behavior owes much" to
his work, Dr. Zerhouni said.

Julius Axelrod was born on May 30, 1912, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
His parents were Jewish immigrants from what is now Poland, and his father
worked as a basket maker. He graduated from City College of New York in 1933
with a degree in biology.

Though he hoped to become a physician, medical schools in that era maintained
strict quotas on accepting Jews, and his applications for admission were
rejected.

After college, Dr. Axelrod found work with the New York City Health
Department testing vitamin supplements.

In 1938, he married Sally Taub, an elementary school teacher.

In 1941, after attending night classes, he earned a master's degree in
chemistry from New York University. In 1946, he became a research associate
of Dr. Bernard Brodie at Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New York, where the
two conducted studies of analgesic medications. He considered Dr. Brodie his
mentor and continued working with him after joining the National Institutes
of Health in 1949.

He received his doctorate from George Washington University in 1955, the same
year he joined the National Institute of Mental Health's Laboratory of
Clinical Science as chief of the pharmacology section.

The work discussed in Dr. Axelrod's Nobel Prize citation focused on the
activity of the chemicals that relay messages from one brain cell to another.
According to Dr. Snyder, most scientists believed that the chemicals, called
neurotransmitters, became inactivated when broken down by enzymes, but Dr.
Axelrod's work indicated that they were actually pumped back into the nerve
cells that had released them.

While some early antidepressants had already been developed, Dr. Axelrod's
research revolutionized the understanding of the way the medications actually
worked. Blocking or inhibiting the reuptake process outlined by Dr. Axelrod
later became crucial to the development of a later generation of
antidepressants, Dr. Snyder said.

Dr. Axelrod, who lost his left eye in a laboratory accident in 1938,
continued working at the mental health institute until 1984, when he retired.
Even afterward, however, he visited the laboratory frequently and remained
involved in various research projects. He received numerous other
professional honors and awards in addition to the Nobel, and in 1996 the
National Institutes of Health named him a scientist emeritus.

Dr. Axelrod recognized early on that discoveries about the role and
functioning of neurotransmitters would significantly alter the treatment of
depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders.

Appearing at a 1987 news conference, he responded to a questioner who asked
whether Sigmund Freud was "dead."

"Not for people who want to spend their money on psychoanalysis," said Dr.
Axelrod, as reported in The Toronto Star, "but for the treatment of severe
mental illness, yes, he is."

Dr. Axelrod, whose wife died in 1992, is survived by two sons, Paul, of
Ripon, Wis., and Alfred, of Wausaukee, Wis., and three grandchildren.

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