Arvid Carlsson

Arvid Carlsson was a Swedish neuropharmacologist, born in Uppsala in 1923 and trained in medicine at Lund University, where he became an associate professor in 1951 and later professor at the University of Gothenburg. In 1957 he showed that dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain and not only a precursor of norepinephrine, and he developed a way to measure it in tissue. He found that animals given reserpine lost dopamine and movement control, and that L-Dopa reversed the effect, a finding that led to L-Dopa treatment of Parkinson disease. With colleagues at Astra he also derived zimelidine, the first marketed SSRI. He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard.