Hard to believe, but there was a time when Dr. Robert Lefkowitz didn’t want to be a scientist.
Good thing he changed his mind.
Otherwise, he would not have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2012. Nor could he look back at more than five decades of research and life-changing discoveries about the inner workings of G-protein-coupled receptors. The class of cell surface receptors has become the target of one-third to half of all prescription drugs, including antihistamines, ulcer drugs, and beta blockers to relieve hypertension, angina and coronary disease.
Lefkowitz shared the award with Brian Kobilka, who did postdoctoral work in his lab at Duke.
“When you’re really working right at the frontier of knowledge, and you’re working on a really important question, it’s going to be tough,” Lefkowitz, the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Medicine and professor of biochemistry and chemistry at Duke University School of Medicine, told Working@Duke in 2021.
“And that means you’re not going to meet with success quickly. I’ve always been drawn to big, important questions, so progress has generally not been rapid. There are problems that we’ve worked on for years before we finally cracked them and some we never crack.”
Lefkowitz joined the Duke faculty in 1973 as an associate professor of medicine and an assistant professor of biochemistry.
His personal perspective – and lessons learned about science and discovery – are perhaps best summarized in The Economist’s review of Lefkowitz’s 2021 memoir, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm”:
“The rollicking memoir from the cardiologist turned legendary scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize that revels in the joy of science and discovery.”
Indeed.
