The early days of discovery
A recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry investigated the workings of cell receptors, the basis of his lengthy, groundbreaking research involving the complex processes of how the body’s cells communicate and interact, while he was a young medical resident at Harvard. From 1970 to 1973, Robert Lefkowitz, now an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, completed his medical residency and clinical training in cardiovascular disease at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and served as a teaching fellow at Harvard Medical School (HMS). While at Harvard, Lefkowitz conducted some of his earliest research into the heart’s adrenergic receptors while working in the laboratories of Edgar Haber, an immunochemist, HMS professor of medicine, and chief of the cardiac unit at MGH. (Haber went on to become the Blout Professor of Biological Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of its Division of Biological Sciences.) Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka of...