Driven to Educate – A Nobel Laureate Acts Out
Ferid Murad, M.D., Ph.D., former director of U.Va’s Clinical Research Center (1971-81) and division chief of clinical pharmacology (1973-81) was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1998 for ground-breaking work on nitric oxide. Today he heads the department of integrative biology, pharmacology and physiology at University of Texas. Although he clearly revels in the honors and the accolades, he is still driven to inspire and educate the youngest students about the thrills that science can offer.
On January 23, Dr. Murad aired a 12-minute video he made with the help of his colleagues at UT to convey the excitement of science as a career to grade school students. In the movie, he bursts out of a TV screen into the living room—the film was shot in his own home—and grabs the popcorn and the kids’ attention. He takes them on a wild ride that spans his own career in which he challenged established doctrine on hormones and receptors.
Murad’s work has focused on the cell signaling role that nitric oxide and cyclic guanosine monophosphate (GMP) play at the cellular level. He showed how nitric oxide and cGMP made in the endothelial lining of blood vessels could relax smooth muscle activity. Ironically, he noted that the Nobel Foundation was founded upon the death of Alfred Nobel, thanks to the profits Nobel and his family created through commercializing nitroglycerine, which is converted in the body to nitric oxide. As early as the 1870’s the substance was used to treat angina and other cardiac conditions, though the mechanisms it used were not understood at the time, as well as being a key ingredient in dynamite—which in turn facilitated global industrial construction and development. Were it not for Nobel’s decision in the very last year of his life to change his will to benefit research in medical science, physics, chemistry, literature and peace (the prize for economics was not established until 1967), the world would have been a much poorer place. Nobel awards, now in their 106th year, focus media attention on the fields in which they are awarded, and remain the highest commendation that can be received for research in these fields.
Much of Dr. Murad’s key research into the role of nitric oxide, which is a gas, and a free radical, was done at the University of Virginia. He demonstrated its powerful activity as a smooth muscle relaxant, and thus plays an important part in such diverse functions as controlling blood platelet aggregation (and therefore strokes), renal function, cardiac contraction, and also can regulate genes, and even penile erection. Today, his research continues into nitric oxide’s effects on memory, inflammation, blood pressure, and its anti-bacterial effects. Murad cited some of the applications of this work including the treatment of pulmonary hypertension in newborn premature infants—known as blue babies—who are helped to breathe on their own after they receive nitric oxide. Other applications include improved wound healing, broncho-dilation in cases of septic shock, and countering the rejection process in tissue transplantation. Nitric oxide’s ability to activate protein kinases may one day mean that it could influence stem cell differentiation, allowing donors to develop new stem cells from their own tissues.
Clearly, Ferid Murad is as stimulated by the excitement of research today as when he started out in the field in the early 60s. If he can jump start some new scientific careers in today’s school students, he will have benefited the future just as Alfred Nobel did more than a century ago with his far-sighted philanthropy.
