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Press Release: Papers of Nobel Laureate Julius Axelrod Added to "Profiles in Science" Web Site

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 2, 2000
CONTACT: Robert Mehnert
Kathy Gardner Cravedi
(301) 496-6308
publicinfo@nlm.nih.gov

Papers of Nobel Laureate Julius Axelrod Added to "Profiles in Science" Web Site

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(Bethesda, Md.)--According to a recent ABC News poll, one of every eight adults in the US has taken Prozac or a similar drug to help relieve anxiety or depression. That they can do so is the result of research by Dr. Julius Axelrod in the 1960's. His work enabled pharmaceutical firms to create anti-depressants like Prozac. Prozac and other similar drugs are called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) because they prevent certain actions of chemicals, called neurotransmitters, in the brain.

Julius Axelrod "Axelrod did not invent Prozac, but he discovered how early antidepressant drugs work in the brain, and he coined the term 'reuptake' to describe those actions," says Dr. Alexa McCray who directs the Profiles in Science project at the National Library of Medicine.

Dr. Julius Axelrod, a Nobel laureate, is the fourth scientist to be added to NLM's "Profiles in Science" website (http://www.profiles.nlm.nih.gov/), dedicated to the lives and works of prominent 20th century biomedical scientists. He joins Oswald Avery, Joshua Lederberg, and Martin Rodbell on the website.

Since his discovery in the early 1960s, Julius Axelrod's explanation for how neurotransmitters work has forever altered the way modern pharmaceutical companies design antidepressant drugs. Furthermore, Axelrod's work has greatly advanced how scientists understand the biological basis of human behavior. Axelrod was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Sir Bernard Katz of University College London and Dr. Ulf von Euler of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Julius Axelrod was born May 30, 1912 in New York City, the son of a Polish immigrant who supported the family as a basketmaker. Axelrod's mother wanted him to be a doctor, but his grades were not good enough and his Jewish heritage also made it difficult for him to get into medical school. After graduating from the City University of New York in 1933, Axelrod was a chemist for the New York City Department of Health and worked for a variety of university and government-sponsored laboratories through 1949. During this period, he helped to discover the pain-relieving medicine acetaminophen, better known by its brand name, Tylenol. Axelrod also lost the sight of his left eye in the mid-1940s when a bottle of ammonia exploded in his face. Despite this accident, he continued to work in the laboratory.

In 1949, Axelrod moved to the National Heart Institute, a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Axelrod became increasingly interested in how drugs affect the nervous system, and was one of the first scientists to conduct full studies of caffeine, amphetamine, and mescaline. In 1954, Axelrod shifted offices to the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health. Over the next 30 years, until his retirement in 1984, he worked on research projects that sought to elucidate the relationship between drugs and behavior. In the late 1950s, for example, he studied how the body metabolizes the drug lysergic acid diethylamide-25, better known as LSD.

Beginning in 1957, Axelrod focused his research on neurotransmitters, hormones that send chemical messages throughout the nervous system. In 1961 he announced that neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin do not merely send information and terminate at the nerve ending. Rather, neurotransmitters are recaptured (reuptaken) by the nerve that originally sent the message, and are used again for later transmissions. As Axelrod told the New York Times that year, "The decisive experiment took a couple of hours.... Working out all the details afterward took three years."

Axelrod's discovery provided a new model for understanding the metabolism of neurotransmitters. His research also suggested that mental states were the result of complicated physiology and brain chemistry, rather than the sole result of psychological or environmental factors. This ushered in an era of pharmacological drugs that were designed to inhibit or stimulate neurotransmitters in the nervous system. Axelrod's work enabled researchers during the 1970s to develop a new class of antidepressant medications, especially SSRIs such as Prozac.

In 1959, Axelrod's interest in neurotransmitters led him to study the workings of the tiny pineal gland located deep in the brain. Axelrod reported that melatonin, the chemical produced by the pineal gland, is actually the neurotransmitter serotonin that has undergone a chemical conversion. He also concluded that the pineal gland is a kind of "relay station" for serotonin in transit in the system. Cycles of serotonin secretion are responsible for what scientists call the body's "circadian rhythms," the natural rhythms that regulate the body's internal mechanisms for rest and sleep.

After he received the Nobel Prize in 1970, Axelrod became a visible public figure. As he remarked in 1978, "I was always conscious of [political issues], but before no one asked me to sign petitions. A Nobel Laureate's signature is very visible." In 1973, for example, Axelrod joined other prominent U.S. scientists who decried the former USSR government's treatment of the dissident nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov.

The new site shows off a variety of documents and includes materials that span the various phases of Axelrod's life and career. These include examples from his extensive collection of laboratory notebooks showing his early experiments with caffeine and LSD, an unpublished manuscript from 1994, and a large sampling of his most important published articles.

"Profiles in Science" was launched September 1998 by the National Library of Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. It is a continuing project and the Library plans to announce each new collection as it is added to the site.

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Note to editors: pictures on this web site may be downloaded and printed. A photograph of Dr. Axelrod is available from the NLM (email requests to publicinfo@nlm.nih.gov).

Julius Axelrod On Pony Julius Axelrod In Lab



Last updated: 28 April 2000
First published: 28 April 2000
Permanence level: Permanent: Stable Content

Last updated: 28 April 2000
First published: 28 April 2000
Permanence level: Permanent: Stable Content