Joseph L. Goldstein

Joseph Leonard Goldstein is an American biochemist, born in Kingstree, South Carolina, in 1940, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. With his fellow University of Texas Southwestern researcher Michael Brown he received the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for studies of cholesterol. They discovered that human cells carry low-density lipoprotein receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood, and that when these receptors are too few people develop hypercholesterolemia and risk heart disease. Their work led to the development of statin drugs. He sits on the board of trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and of Rockefeller University.