Murad, Ferid (1936-2023), was an American physician who performed basic research on nitric oxide, a gas produced by many types of body cells. Murad’s research showed that nitric oxide is an important chemical messenger that helps regulate relaxation of blood vessels and other important bodily functions. Murad shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro, two other American scientists who studied the many roles played by nitric oxide in the body and its potential medical uses.
Murad was born on Sept. 14, 1936, in Whiting, Indiana. He was the son of an Albanian father and an American mother. He received a B.A. degree from DePauw University in 1958 and both an M.D. and a Ph.D. degree in pharmacology (the science of drugs) in 1965 from Western (now Case Western) Reserve University. He served his internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston from 1965 to 1967 and practiced medicine at the National Heart and Lung Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1967 to 1970.
During the 1970’s and most of the 1980’s, Murad combined teaching and research. He taught pharmacology and internal medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine from 1970 to 1981 and at Stanford University from 1981 to 1988. He conducted much of his research on nitric oxide at those universities. While at Stanford, he also served as chief of medicine at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Palo Alto, California.
In the late 1980’s, Murad became a drug company executive. He served as vice president of research and development at Abbott Laboratories in Abbott Park, Illinois, from 1988 to 1992 and as president and chief executive officer of Molecular Geriatrics Corporation in Lake Bluff, Illinois, from 1993 to 1997. He returned to teaching in 1997, becoming chairman of the Department of Integrative Biology, Pharmacology, and Physiology at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. Murad died on Sept. 4, 2023.
