Alfred G. Gilman

Alfred Goodman Gilman was an American pharmacologist and biochemist, born on July 1, 1941, the son of Alfred Gilman, who co-authored Goodman and Gilman The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics. He earned a BA in biology with a major in biochemistry from Yale University in 1962, worked at Burroughs Wellcome, and joined Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine for an MD-PhD course, obtaining his degree in 1969. After working with Marshall Nirenberg at the National Institutes of Health he became assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1971 and later chaired the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He and Martin Rodbell shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells. He died on December 23, 2015.