Extensive Drug Information Added to MEDLINEplus

Minority Scholarships

Health Disparities Plan

Rare Items on Display

Medieval Merriment

Islamic Manuscripts

"Old" Books

MEDLARS Drive

MLA Annual Meeting

Native American Youth

Profiles in Science

Women's History Month

OCCS Director Named

Appointments

National Nutrition Summit

NN/LM Appointment

Lederberg Exhibit

"Has the Laboratory Been a Closet?"

Leiter Lecture

Monograph Gaps

Alternative Medicine Chief

Names in the News

Products and Publications

NLM In Print

The accomplishments of some of the giants of 20th century biomedicine are newly available as NLM makes the scientists' archival collections accessible through the latest digital technology on its "Profiles in Science" web site (profiles.nlm.nih.gov). The most recent addition to the "Profiles" archive is pharmacologist and neuroscientist Julius Axelrod, who shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for discoveries "concerning the humoral transmittors in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation." Dr. Axelrod spent his most fruitful years of research at NIH, first at the (then) National Heart Institute and later at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

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. Axelrod in the 1960's. His work enabled pharmaceutical firms to create anti-depressants like Prozac. "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 NLM. McCray directs the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications.

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. He 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 NIMH. 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. 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 "Profiles" 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 involving caffeine and LSD, an unpublished manuscript from 1994, and a large sampling of his most important published articles.

Axelrod, known to friends as "Julie," still comes to the lab about three times a week to conduct research, according to Dr. Michael J. Brownstein, Chief, Laboratory of Genetics, NIMH/National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). As Brownstein recounts, "He has a greater capacity than most scientists to take pleasure in other people's novel findings and to suggest follow-up experiments."

Select another issue

Cumulative Index