Furchgott, Robert F(rancis) (1916– )

US pharmacologist who with US pharmacologists Ferid Murad and Louis J Ignarro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1998 for the discovery that nitric oxide acts as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system.

Furchgott observed that the effect of drugs on blood vessels was not always the same. The same drug could cause contraction of the blood vessel at one time and dilation at another. He suspected that this behaviour was connected with the surface cells on the inner liner of the blood vessel, known as the endothelium. In 1980, he discovered that the endothelial cells could produce an unknown signal molecule that caused vascular smooth muscle cells to relax. He called this molecule the endothelium-derived relaxing factor, EDRF. This discovery led to a search to find out what EDRF actually was. In 1986, working independently from Furchgott, Louis J Ignarro identified that EDRF was nitric oxide. This discovery resulted in considerably increased international research on the function of nitric oxide and led directly to the development of the anti-impotence drug sildenafil citrate, commonly known as Viagra.

Furchgott was born in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. He received his PhD in biochemistry from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, in 1940. Furchgott was a professor of the department of pharmacology, State University of New York, from 1956 until 1988. He became adjunct professor at the school of medicine of the University of Miami, Florida, in 1988.