Ferid Murad
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Ferid Murad
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1998
Born: 14 September 1936, Whiting, IN, USA
Died: 4 September 2023, Menlo Park, CL, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of Texas Medical School at Houston, Houston, TX, USA
Prize motivation: “for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system”
Prize share: 1/3
Life
Ferid Murad’s father emigrated from Albania and his mother was American. Murad grew up in Whiting, Indiana, where his parents operated a restaurant. After studying at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and doctoral studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, he has worked at several American universities, including the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Stanford University in California, where he did his Nobel Prize-awarded research. Murad is married and has five children.
Work
Ever since the days of Alfred Nobel, it has been known that nitroglycerin causes blood vessels to expand. Ferid Murad studied how nitroglycerin activated an enzyme that formed cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP), which in turn caused blood vessels to expand. In 1976 Murad was able to show that nitroglycerin produced this effect by emitting nitric oxide (NO). The discovery represented a new principle for transferring signals between cells; a gas as a signal-transferring molecule had never been observed before.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
