After reaching the top of his class at an elite Bronx high school, excelling at Columbia and in medical school, facing failure as a young government scientist was a newfangled and unwelcome experience. After all, preparing for a career in medicine wasn’t the same as designing chemistry experiments. However, it is the latter path that would culminate in a Nobel Prize, decades down the road.
This rocky path to the Nobel Prize was the focus of a talk by Duke University physician, biochemist, researcher and 2012 Nobel Prize winner Robert “Bob” Lefkowitz given Monday night to East students, where he discussed his life trajectory and eventual scientific discoveries.
Since age eight, Lefkowitz knew he wanted to be a doctor. Growing up in the Bronx, he admired the family physician who visited their home and let him play with the stethoscope.
“Although I love science, it never entered my mind that I might become a scientist,” Lefkowitz said. “I was quite convinced that I would be a practicing physician, an internist and a cardiologist, that that was how I would spend my career. Very happy fulfilling my calling.”
What changed after graduating from medical school at Columbia was the ongoing Vietnam War, which conscripted every American doctor for a two-year term into the armed services. Lefkowitz says he was fortunate enough to enter the National Institute of Health to fulfill his requirement, where his peers included Dr. Tony Fauci and two other current Nobel Laureates. However, he calls his initial experience an “unmitigated disaster.”
“Most of us had no research experience whatsoever. So, how did it go for me at the NIH? Terrible, terrible, terrible; nothing that I did worked,” Lefkowitz said. “This was an entirely new experience for me. I was always top of my class, I was a reasonable athlete. I never really failed in a protracted way at anything that I had tried to do in my life. And here I was, despite working as hard as I possibly could, and absolutely nothing is working.”
In the last six months of his tour, Lefkowitz’ experiments began to work and he felt “the thrill of discovery” for the first time. Still, he intended to leave researching for good to begin his medical career as soon as possible.
However, as he worked his dream job as a physician, he discovered that he still wanted to continue scientific work.
“I loved clinical medicine. I’d always loved medicine, and I was good at it. But by the time I finished the first six months, I realized that I was vaguely missing something,” Lefkowitz said. “It took me several months to figure out what was going on, but then I finally realized that I actually missed the laboratory. I think if I’m just going to do clinical medicine, I’m not going to feel completely fulfilled.”
Lefkowitz moved from Boston to Duke University in 1973, and continued his dual path as a physician and scientist. He says he spent increasingly more time in the lab as his research “took off.”
For most of his research career, Lefkowitz studied the relationship between hormones and drugs outside cells and the inner workings of the cells, like how adrenaline could stimulate a heart cell. Through his experiments he discovered a huge family of cell receptors called G protein-coupled receptors in 1986, beginning with adrenaline receptors and now including over 1,000 different types.
His work has been implemented into the development of more than one-third of FDA-approved drugs, including antihistamines and beta-blockers. It has also led to physiological discoveries such as taste and smell receptors.
In 2012, Lefkowitz was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with cell receptors.
“Let me just say it’s an amazing experience to be called to be told you are receiving the Nobel Prize,” Lefkowitz said. “I was sleeping soundly on Wednesday, October 10th, when at 5 a.m., I received the call that I had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.”
After that, he was congratulated by Duke’s Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski, who gave him a number one “Lefkowitz” jersey which hangs in his office, and was cheered by Duke student basketball fans chanting “He’s so smart.” Lefkowitz says he has also met people such as Barack Obama, Sting and Peter Gabriel.
Lefkowitz is the author of “Something Funny Happened On the Way to Stockholm.” At 77, he still does research at Duke University, and after teaching clinical medicine for over 30 years, says he “eventually finally hung up [his] stethoscope altogether.” He says he now spends all of his time in his laboratories.
“The research, after a couple of years, really took off,” Lefkowitz said. “It was just like riding a wild horse and not wanting to be thrown off. So I was just holding on for dear life, research was racing along and I was holding on, and the next thing I know, 50 years went by.”
Photo courtesy of Bengt Nyman/Flickr
