Greengard, Paul (1925– )

US neurobiologist who with Swedish pharmacologist Arvid Carlsson and US neurobiologist Eric R Kandel shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000 for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. Greengard discovered how dopamine and other transmitters operate in the nervous system.

Transmitters, such as dopamine, transmit their signals between nerve cells using a process called ‘slow synaptic transmission’. Greengard discovered that the transmitter, released from one nerve cell, initially acts on a receptor on the surface of another nerve cell. This causes proteins in that cell to become modified by the addition of phosphate groups, a process called phosphorylation that alters the shape and function of the protein. By this mechanism transmitters carry their messages between cells.

Slow synaptic transmission is responsible for certain functions of the nervous system, such as mood and alertness. Disruptions to signal transmission can result in neurological and psychiatric diseases and Greengard's research has already led to the development of new drugs to combat these illnesses.

Greengard was born in New York. He was director of biochemical research at Geigy Reseach Laboratories, Ardsley, New York, from 1959 until 1967, when he became professor of pharmacology and psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut, a post he held until 1983. He is currently Vincent Astor professor and head of the laboratory of molecular and cellular neuroscience at The Rockefeller University, New York.