Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm

Robert J. Lefkowitz is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist (Chemistry, 2012) who is best known for showing how adrenaline works via stimulation of specific receptors. He was trained at Columbia, the NIH and Harvard before joining the faculty at Duke University and becoming an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In addition to being a researcher, Dr. Lefkowitz is a cardiologist as well as a cardiac patient.  Randy Hall was a post-doctoral trainee of Dr. Lefkowitz in the 1990’s and is now a Professor in the Emory University School of Medicine. He has published more than one hundred scientific papers and received major awards for his research. He is also a prize-winning educator with strong interests in science writing and public outreach about science and medicine.

"Cardiologist-turned-biochemist, Robert Lefkowitz won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for showing how adrenaline works through stimulation of specific receptors, with huge implications for drug discovery. Yet he calls himself 'an accidental scientist,' because he trained as a physician. Instead of being drafted to the Vietnam War, he served at the US National Institutes of Health. His autobiography is a vividly anecdotal account, influenced by a supervisor’s lesson that data do not tell a story: 'A story is something you impose on the data.'"