Robert Lefkowitz

Robert Lefkowitz is a podcast. It has 3 episodes, with the latest published September 2014.

In the late 1960s, it was already known that hormones such as adrenalin, histamine, dopamine and serotonin stimulate specific responses in the cells of human beings and other organisms. But the mechanism by which cells perceive and respond to these hormones was shrouded in mystery. In 1969, Lefkowitz successfully attached a radioactive isotope of iodine to a form of the hormone adrenaline, enabling him to track its movements within an organism. By 1974, he observed the hormone interacting with a specific protein in the cell wall, the first of many such "G Protein coupled receptors" (GPCRs) he would identify in the next 15 years of groundbreaking research. In 1986, he and his associates at Duke University Medical Center succeeded in cloning and sequencing the gene for one of these receptors and found that it responds to adrenaline much as receptors in the eye register light. He has since identified a superfamily of receptor proteins that circulate back and forth through the cell wall, t

·en-us ·3 episodes