Gilman, Alfred (1941– )

US pharmacologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1994 with Martin Rodbell for their discovery of a family of proteins (G-proteins) that translate messages – in the form of hormones or other chemical signals – into action inside cells.

When an outside message – in the form of a hormone or other chemical signal – reaches a cell it enters through a specific receptor molecule on the cell surface. As it crosses the cell membrane, the message is translated, or converted into a second internal chemical signal that the cell can understand.

In the late 1970s Gilman and his colleagues isolated the molecule (dubbed a G-protein) that does the translation. Since Gilman's discovery many G-proteins have been identified. For example, there are specific G-proteins in the rods and cones of the eye. More than 100 receptors have been identified that translate messages using G-proteins.

Gilman was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University, New Haven, and Case Western Reserve University, receiving his doctorate in 1969. From 1969–71, he worked for the National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. He taught at the University of Virginia from 1871–81. He then became director of pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.