Michael Stuart Brown

Michael Stuart Brown is an American geneticist and Nobel laureate, born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 13, 1941. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962 and received his M.D. from its School of Medicine in 1966. He then moved to the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas, now the UT Southwestern Medical Center, where with his colleague Joseph L. Goldstein he researched cholesterol metabolism and discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein receptors that extract cholesterol from the bloodstream. Their work explained the pathology of familial hypercholesterolemia, uncovered receptor-mediated endocytosis and led to the development of statin drugs. Brown was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Goldstein in 1985 for describing the regulation of cholesterol metabolism.