My father, Alfred Gilman, could play almost any musical
instrument and frequently did so
at neighborhood parties; his father owned a
music store in Bridgeport, Connecticut. My mother, Mabel Schmidt Gilman, was
an excellent pianist and gave lessons; her father was a professional trombonist,
also in Bridgeport. Despite this heritage, my musical career ended after a few
years of mediocre performance with the Yale University Concert Band during my
days in college.
There were more substantial influences. My father had turned to science, receiving
his Ph.D. in Physiological Chemistry from Yale in 1931 for "Chemical and Physiological
Investigations on Canine Gastric Secretion". He then joined the faculty of the
Department of Pharmacology at the Yale Medical School, where he and Louis S.
Goodman, a young M.D., became colleagues and close friends. A major new textbook
of Pharmacology The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, was the fruit
of the Goodman and Gilman collaboration, first published in 1941. I too was
born in 1941 (in New Haven, Connecticut) and named Alfred Goodman Gilman. Perhaps
my fate was sealed from that day; as my friend Michael Brown once said, I am
probably the only person who was ever named after a textboook.
The bulk of my childhood was spent in a suburb of New York City, White Plains,
while my father was first on the faculty of The College of Physicians and Surgeons
of Columbia University and then the founding Chairman of Pharmacology at the
new Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I remember exciting trips to the city
with my parents and elder sister Joanna to visit museums and, particularly,
the Hayden Planetarium. In the early 1950's I made a reservation for a trip
to the moon and was quite positive that I wanted to be an astronomer. Alas,
I eventually learned that astronomers do little star gazing, and biology began
to look more appealing. These feelings were clearly nurtured by trips to my
father's laboratory, where I was able to watch experiments on canine renal function.
There were also elaborate pharmacological demonstrations prepared for the medical
students. All of these experiences were very visual. It is perhaps surprising
that I eventually turned to biochemical approaches to pharmacology; it is not
much fun to watch someone pipette.
My parents were less than enthusiastic about the local high school, and I was
"sent away" in 1955, not smiling, to The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut
for grades 10 - 12. New England boys' "prep" schools were not much fun in the
1950's. There was much I did not enjoy, from compulsory rising bells to compulsory
religion and compulsory athletics. I was surely the worst 120-pound lineman
on the intramural tackle football team. But the education was superb, and I
learned how to learn. Chemistry, physics, and math were extraordinary, and I
was even forced to write - an essay every week. My final victory was from my
English teacher. "Not bad, Gilman," he said, "it still sounds like a lab report,
but not bad."
After Taft, college (at Yale University) was relatively easy and a lot more
fun. I majored in Biochemistry and was inspired by the best series of lectures
ever delivered - by Henry A. Harbury, who taught half the course. The room was
always overflowing, in part because the medical interns and residents arrived
to hear protein chemistry and thermodynamics come to life; I swear it's the
truth. I also had my first real opportunity to work on my own in a lab - that
of Melvin Simpson. My project was wildly overambitious, to test Francis Crick's
adapter hypothesis, but the experience was an enormous treat because of Simpson's
warmth and strong encouragement.
I met my eventual wife at this time, and she
spent many late nights in the lab with me as I manually fed planchettes into
the radioactivity counter. Perhaps she should have smelled the competition.
The summer after college (1962) I worked in Allan Conney's lab at Burroughs
Wellcome in New York and, thanks to Conney's generosity, I published my first
two papers. There was no question in my mind that research was for me as I headed
to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in the fall of 1962, following
the lure of cyclic AMP and a novel M.D.-Ph.D. program. My initial interactions
with Gilman Alfred G. xxx drawings - Earl G. pantyhose Alfred - Gilman encasement rape - movies incest Alfred Gilman G. Трансформатор ТСЗ Alfred G. Gilman - Alfred ткань 2110 ВАЗ 12 направленный 11 G. Gilman - подиум Sutherland buy G. - dvd rape Alfred Gilman are described in G. Gilman - xxx Alfred drawings my Nobel lecture and need not be repeated
here. My experience in Cleveland was most notable, socially, for my marriage
to Kathryn Hedlund and the births of our first two children and, scientifically,
for interactions with Ted Rall, my thesis advisor and now close friend. His
commitment was epitomized by the excuse, usually necessary, when I arrived home
for dinner at nine: "I just went into Ted's office at five o'clock for a few
minutes to talk about an experiment."
Rall was working on cyclic AMP in the brain, while I toiled with the thyroid
gland. The brain looked a bit more interesting, and I was particularly struck
by the molecular biologists who had "solved" their field and were defecting
to the nervous system en mass. Clonal cell lines and genetic approaches
seemed to be the answer, and I asked to work with Marshall Nirenberg via the
Pharmacology Research Associate Training Program of the National Institute of
General Medical Sciences. My experience with Marshall (1969 1971) was enormously
broadening, despite the fact that I was "forced" (for a while) to work on cyclic
AMP. I also met friends who were to
have a great influence later, particularly
Joseph Goldstein, who had not seen the neural light and was working in the residual
protein synthesis section of the Nirenberg laboratory. I had the fortune to
develop a simple and sensitive assay for cyclic AMP while in Bethesda. It helped
make second messengers accessible to everyone, and it surely made my name visible
as I looked for a job.
Continuing what was to become a habit - when moving, always move south - I became
an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville
in 1971. The position was a particularly attractive opportunity to join old
friends from Cleveland, including Joseph Lamer (the Chairman), Robert Haynes,
Ferid Murad, and Bob Berne. The environment was intellectually supportive and,
slowly but surely, good things began to happen. Crucial were the advent of ligand
binding assays for receptors, the development by Gordon Tomkins and associates
of S49 cells (which were killed by cyclic AMP), and the arrival in 1975 of a
superb new postdoctoral fellow, Elliott Ross. Elliott's hope was to get help
from genetics while unraveling the biochemistry of a complex piece of membrane
biology. The cyclic AMP system interested him, and he had planned to join Tomkins.
Gordon's untimely death forced Ross to a second choice, and I was the beneficiary.
Ross's contributions were enormous, as described in the Nobel lecture, and his
success inspired others to join the group, particularly including his friend
from Cornell, Paul Sternweis, and John Northrop.
Joe Goldstein and Mike Brown approached me to move to Dallas in 1979, but I
was totally immersed in research and my other major preoccupation, editing the
sixth edition of Goodman and Gilman's the Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics.
Amusingly, Martin Rodbell almost took the job, but, when he eventually declined,
the Dallas crowd came calling again - this time with a real talker in
the lead, Donald Seldin. Very few say no to Dr. Seldin, and I arrived in Dallas
to chair the Department of Pharmacology in 1981. I have been extraordinarily
happy in Dallas and have benefitted greatly from close interactions with colleagues
like Brown and Goldstein and from the opportunity to recruit those whom I knew
to be superb - Ross and Sternweis. I
have derived great satisfaction from building
what I consider to be an excellent department, and I hope that our faculty feel
as encouraged as I did in Charlottesville. It is easy to be a successful Chair
in Dallas; our administration, particularly President Kern Wildenthal and Dean
William Neaves, and local philanthropists ensure it.
My wife and three children, Amy, Anne, and Ted, have always been strongly supportive
and wonderfully understanding of the intense competition from my affair with
science. My children have not benefitted from the lavish fatherly attention
that I did. Despite me, they are well on their way to happy and productive lives.
I am very proud of them and of their super mother, who has made up for my deficiencies.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1994, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1995
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
 
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