{"id":2857,"date":"2012-10-10T16:49:25","date_gmt":"2012-10-10T22:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=2857"},"modified":"2012-10-10T16:49:25","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T22:49:25","slug":"robert-lefkowitz-shares-in-nobel-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/robert-lefkowitz-shares-in-nobel-prize\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Lefkowitz shares in Nobel Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

JTA) — Robert Lefkowitz, a Jewish physician and biochemist, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Brian Kobilka, a Stanford University researcher. Lefkowitz, 61, and Kobilka, 57, won for \u201cgroundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family … of receptors: G-protein-coupled receptors,\u201d a posting Wednesday on the website of the Nobel Prize stated.<\/p>\n

Understanding how these receptors function helped further explain how cells could sense their environment, according to the text. They will share a $1.2 million grant from the Nobel Prize Committee.<\/p>\n

Lefkowitz, a New York native who works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, and Kobilka worked together to isolate and analyze a gene that led them to discover that \u201cthe receptor was similar to one in the eye that captures light. They realized that there is a whole family of receptors that look alike and function in the same manner,\u201d the Nobel Prize website said.<\/p>\n

A day earlier, the Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm announced that Serge Haroche, a French-Jewish physicist, had won the Nobel Prize in physics with David Wineland of the United States. The 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Dan Shechtman of Israel\u2019s Technion.<\/p>\n

In 2008, Lefkowitz received the U.S. National Medal of Science. The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles reported at the time that he was one of three American-Jewish recipients that year of the nation’s highest honor in science and technology.<\/p>\n

In an interview that appeared this summer on the Duke website, Lefkowitz is quoted as saying, “I was clearly destined to be a physician, I dreamed about it from the third grade on. Wouldn\u2019t trade that part of my experience in for anything. I LOVED medical school.” He also said that “I do regret that my dad died thinking I would be a practicing cardiologist, never dreaming what the future held for me.”<\/p>\n

Lefkowitz’s father, who died at the age of 63, “never got to see any of this play out,” Lefkowitz said.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Share