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.