Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard and Eric Kandel have one thing in common: did fundamental work in the field of brain research – in particular to the signalling pathway in the brain – and have the Nobel Prize received for this together in the year for Physiology or Medicine (the official name of the award). Their research have helped, inter alia, to get knowledge about Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia and other nervous and develop appropriate medication.
The Swede Arvid Carlsson of Gothenburg University is a pioneer in the fight against Parkinson’s disease. In the 1950s, he discovered the importance of signal substance dopamine in the brain and its role for the muscle movements.
1951 Carlsson a doctor of medicine at the University of Lund. in 1959 he was appointed Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Gothenburg. He has received a number of other scientific awards besides the Nobel Prize. So, he got the Israeli Wolf Prize for medicine and 1994 1979 the so-called Japanese Nobel Prize. Carlsson retired in 1989.
The American Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University in New York City in the 1960s discovered how dopamine and a number of other signal substances interact with the nervous system. Greengard is working on better treatments for schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. 1948, He began with his investigations in the laboratory of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he graduated in 1953.
in 1968, Greengard became Professor of Pharmacology and Psychiatry at Yale University in new Hagen. Since 1983, he is a professor at New York’s Rockefeller University. Among the many awards received Greengard, are the prices of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Ellison Medical Foundation.
He is in Austria-born US citizen Eric Kandel of Columbia University in New York conducted research at important functions of learning and memory and first used the marine snail Aplysia. Kandel’s work led to the realization that the short- and long-term memory is related to the synapses (extensions of nerve cells). His research could be especially for people with memory loss of importance.
Kandel, whose Jewish Familie emigrated to the United States in 1939, studied history and literature at Harvard University before he came to medicine and in 1956 received his doctorate at New York University in this subject. In 1965, he returned to New York after scientific stations in Boston and Paris and was in 1974 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of at Columbia University, Director of the Center for Neurobiology and behavior; Kandel’s numerous awards include the New York Academy of medicine award and the National Medal of science.
Due to increasing life expectancy, diseases of the nervous system are among the conditions that meet more and more people. With the award of the Nobel Medicine Prize on the three scientists their works are awarded for understanding of brain functions and their diseases, as for example Alzheimer’s, slacking of memory or even depression and thus potential development of medicinal products.