Gilman, Alfred Goodman (1941-2015), was an American physician and scientific researcher who made important discoveries about how living cells communicate with each other and respond to outside influences. In 1977, Gilman proved that substances known as G-proteins help relay the signals a cell receives from other cells or from forces outside the body, such as light or odors. G-proteins are so named because they bind to a compound called guanosine triphosphate, one of the smaller chemical units known as nucleotides that make up the hereditary material DNA. Researchers have since linked abnormal G-proteins to cancer, cholera, diabetes, and other diseases. For his work, Gilman shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with the American biochemist Martin Rodbell, who first suggested the existence of G-proteins.
Gilman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, also named Alfred Gilman, was a prominent pharmacologist (specialist in the study of drugs) and coauthor of a leading textbook on pharmacology. This book was first published in 1941 as The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics. Young Gilman went into the same field. He received a B.S. degree in biochemistry from Yale University in 1962 and a Ph.D. in pharmacology and an M.D. degree from Case Western Reserve University, both in 1969.
Gilman worked as a research associate in pharmacology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1969 to 1971. He joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1971, where he combined teaching with the research that won the Nobel Prize. He became a professor of pharmacology there in 1977. He also edited the fifth through the eighth editions of his father’s textbook, published in 1975, 1980, 1985, and 1990 as Goodman and Gilman’s the Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics. In 1981, Gilman moved to Dallas, becoming chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He retired from the university in 2009. From 2009 to 2012, Gilman was chief scientific officer of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, a state agency. He died on Dec. 23, 2015.
