Martin Rodbell

Martin Rodbell was an American biochemist and molecular endocrinologist, born in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 1, 1925, the son of a grocer. After graduating from Baltimore City College high school he entered Johns Hopkins University in 1943 with interests in biology and French existential literature, interrupted his studies to serve as a U.S. Navy radio operator in the Second World War, and received his B.S. in biology in 1949. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Washington in 1954, did postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in 1956 became a research biochemist at the National Heart Institute. He later served as adjunct professor of pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is best known for his discovery of G-proteins and shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Alfred G. Gilman. He died on December 7, 1998.