Paul Greengard Discusses Neuroscience and Winning the Nobel Prize

In a recent video from the series Conversations with Giants in Medicine, Nobel Laureate Paul Greengard discusses his work in neuroscience and the Nobel Prize.

In 2000, Greengard was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with two other men. His work paved the way for treatments for Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. He established base knowledge for neurotransmitters and slow synaptic transmission that many neuroscientists and neurologists use today.

In the video, Greengard says that he did not get the “bug” of doing scientific research from home because the environment growing up was anti-intellectual. He suspects that going to college was an act of rebellion. Greengard used the G.I. Bill in order to go to college because he served in the military during World War II. He says he studied mathematics and physics. He planned to go to graduate school in order to work in theoretical physics. He states that he changed his mind after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He says:

“Almost immediately after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I felt that [theoretical physics] was not an area that I wanted to be very involved in, just because I thought there were better ways of spending my life than trying to destroy mankind.”

About that time, he learned about the then-nascent field of medical physics, or biophysics, and became interested in studying that. During this time, he says he decided it would be beneficial to learn about the underlying biochemical and molecular properties of nerve cells. He studied at John Hopkins University for his Ph.D before traveling to England and Holland for five years. He worked for nine years at a pharmaceutical company, which shaped the way Greengard did his research.

He explains:

“It gave me an education of the sort that one might’ve gotten in medical school. At the time I was ready to do advanced studies, I decided not to go to medical school because at that time, it was very much of a hands-on profession where the physicians really couldn’t do very much for the patients. They were brilliant clinicians but there were very limited repertoire of tools that they had.”

He says that his key advance to medical science was discovering that the nervous system responded to neurotransmitters the way the endocrine system responded to hormones.

He states:

“People said unkind things [about the discovery]. Like, ‘This is heretical and nonsense.’ The interesting thing about it was that because it was considered so unlikely to be true, I had basically 15 years… to develop this story. By the time people accepted it, my research group had laid a lot of the foundation of the molecular bases for neurotransmission. So we didn’t have this ultra-heavy competition.”

Greengard mentions that in his conversations with other Nobel Prize winners revealed that they, too, contributed an advance that nobody believed at first.

He explains:

“In many instances it was the same thing: They’ve done something very unconventional and nobody believed them for a while, and it was shown to be true. And if you think about it, it’s more or less the only way the thing could work. If you just did something that was very incremental, it wouldn’t be worthy of a Nobel Prize…. Occasionally there are different types of discoveries, but many of the discoveries that have been made were paradigm shifts where somebody did something that people didn’t accept because it was not consistent with a prevailing paradigm.”

A Conversation with Dr. Thomas Starzl: A Giant in Medicine

In a recent video, Dr. Thomas Starzl of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center answers questions about his career as the “Father of Modern Transplantation.”

Throughout his career, Starzl invented techniques and models for managing heart blockages, performing transplants, and working with immunosuppressants. He performed the first successful liver transplant in 1967 and refined the use of immunosuppressive drugs. Due to his efforts over the last 50 years, thousands of patients with end-stage liver disease have been able to live long and active lives.

Starzl describes his career as beginning in 1945 after he was discharged from the navy. He used the G.I. Bill to go into medical school. He says that he pulled inspiration from his mother, who was a nurse and of whom he thought highly. In 1947, he received his BA and went off to medical school at Northwestern University. He explains why he dropped out of school for almost a year: to do “pure research” in neuroscience, in which he received his Ph.D. After joining John Hopkins, he delved into “another side alley of cardiac physiology.”

He says:

“After we had encountered complete heart block in some of the early heart operations, and needed to develop some way to deal with that complication, I developed a model of complete heart block in dogs, studied the complete physiology, figured out how to do pace making, and solved the problem.”

He then became interested in metabolism. He explains that he developed models of transplantation that involved either the liver alone or the liver with other abdominal viscera, and then became interested in transplantation biology. He says that the real opportunity in this field of clinical studies was to study rejection patterns in liver allographs for the first time. 

Starzl faced so much uncertainty about the nature of his research at the time that it was difficult to receive funding. He says that somehow he thought that everything would turn out all right, and that his greatest source of anxiety was actually the uncertainty of not knowing what to do.

He says,

“I referred to myself at one time as a missile searching for a trajectory. I was bursting with energy. I really wanted to do something that wasn’t conventional, that wasn’t bread and butter surgery as a means of making money; I wanted to do something important that would have a life of its own—that would endure. But what to do? I had come to be regarded as a dilatant, having gone through a Ph.D. in neuroscience and then a Ph.D. equivalent in working out the heart block problem, and now here I was wondering around, not pursuing either field. I just didn’t know what to do with myself.”

He went on to travel across the country and continue conducting clinical trials in order to work with liver transplants, realizing that a successful liver transplants and functions required healthy kidneys. He says he remembers his patients from clinical trials as if they were family members.

Watch the full interview below.

PWC Report Shows Decrease in Life Sciences Venture Capital Funding; Still Cause for Hope

A recent report released by PwC’s Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences Industry Group indicates that life sciences venture capital funding has shrunk for the fourth straight quarter.

On medcitynews.com, contributor Arundhati Parmar writes that “the decline was 39 percent in amount invested and 22 percent in number of deals in the second quarter from the same quarter in 2011. Total money invested in the sector that includes biotechnology and medical devices was $1.4 billion in the second quarter and the number of deals fell to 174. What’s more, the results show a four quarter slide.”

He continues,

“Both biotech and medical device venture funding took a hit. A total of 84 deals brought in $800 million for the medical device industry, but the numbers represent drops of 11 percent in deal volume and 17 percent in amount invested year over year. Biotech took a much bigger hit with a 52 percent decline in funding to $697 million and a 30 percent drop in number of deals to 90 deals in the second quarter.” Read more at medcitynews.com.

However, there is still cause for hope. As global managing partner of the venture capital practice at PwC US Tracy T. Lefteroff explained,

“The pace of venture-backed exits we saw for life sciences companies during 2011 should encourage investors. If M&A activity picks up during the second half of this year, investors should continue to see a clearer path to returns, which potentially could attract more money to be invested in this sector.

“Additionally, the new Jobs Act could spur more confidential IPO filings, creating the opportunity for more exits. This act makes it easier for start-ups with under $1 billion in annual revenue to go public by relaxing Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for five years.”

He continued,

“Finally, the recently passed user fee legislation contains some incentives for companies to develop breakthrough therapies for infectious and rare diseases. These include extended market exclusivity for qualified infectious disease products and expedited FDA review for therapies that address unmet medical needs to treat rare and life-threatening diseases and conditions. Such incentives could pique the interest of investors in companies developing innovative products that might have a shorter path to market.”

Read the full report here.