Rodbell, Martin (1925– )

US molecular biochemist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1994 with Alfred Gilman 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 1960s Rodbell showed that the cell needed a separate molecular component to carry out the translation process. The molecule was identified in the late 1970s by Gilman and his colleagues at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and dubbed a G-protein. Since Gilman's discovery many G-proteins has 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.

Rodbell was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and educated at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the University of Washington, receiving his doctorate in 1954. He worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, until 1985 when he joined the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, near Durham, North Carolina. He retired in 1994.