[Deathwatch] Julius Axelrod, Nobel Prize winner, 92

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Julius Axelrod Dies at 92; Won Nobel in Medicine
By DAVID TULLER

Published: December 31, 2004

Julius Axelrod, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped to discover
how chemicals released by nerve cells in the brain regulate mood and
behavior, died on Wednesday at his home in Rockville, Md., the National
Institute of Mental Health, where he worked for most of his career,
said. He was 92.

Dr. Axelrod shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with
two other scientists, Dr. Bernard Katz of Britain and Prof. Ulf von
Euler of Sweden. Their work was essential to the development of
psychiatric drugs and others and led directly to the development of
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the class of antidepressants
that includes Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil.

The Nobel Foundation cited the men "for their discoveries concerning
the transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their
storage, release and inactivation." But Dr. Axelrod's influence
extended far beyond the discoveries related to the prize.

In the 1940's, even before receiving his doctorate in pharmacology, Dr.
Axelrod played a major role in identifying acetaminophen as the
pain-relieving chemical in a common headache treatment of the day.

The newly discovered substance was later developed and marketed by
Johnson & Johnson under the brand name Tylenol. Dr. Axelrod also helped
to discover an enzyme system essential for metabolizing drugs in the
liver, the hormone melatonin, and other critical biochemical processes
and substances.

"His contributions to pharmacology, especially in terms of how drugs
act in the brain, were extraordinary," said Dr. Solomon Snyder, the
director of the neuroscience department at the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine and a longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Axelrod.

"In fact, the work for which he got the Nobel Prize was just a tiny
percentage of his scientific output," Dr. Snyder said. "He had the gift
of figuring out simple ways of measuring things. He could have a rack
of 20 test tubes, do an experiment and answer five important questions
by lunchtime."

In a statement, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes
of Health in Bethesda, Md., said "countless millions of individuals"
benefited daily from medications that Dr. Axelrod's insights made
possible.

"Our understanding of the biological basis of human behavior owes much"
to his work, Dr. Zerhouni said.

Julius Axelrod was born on May 30, 1912, on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan. His parents were Jewish immigrants from what is now Poland,
and his father worked as a basket maker. He graduated from City College
of New York in 1933 with a degree in biology.

Though he hoped to become a physician, medical schools in that era
maintained strict quotas on accepting Jews, and his applications for
admission were rejected.

After college, Dr. Axelrod found work with the New York City Health
Department testing vitamin supplements.

In 1938, he married Sally Taub, an elementary school teacher.

In 1941, after attending night classes, he earned a master's degree in
chemistry from New York University. In 1946, he became a research
associate of Dr. Bernard Brodie at Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New
York, where the two conducted studies of analgesic medications. He
considered Dr. Brodie his mentor and continued working with him after
joining the National Institutes of Health in 1949.

He received his doctorate from George Washington University in 1955,
the same year he joined the National Institute of Mental Health's
Laboratory of Clinical Science as chief of the pharmacology section.

The work discussed in Dr. Axelrod's Nobel Prize citation focused on the
activity of the chemicals that relay messages from one brain cell to
another. According to Dr. Snyder, most scientists believed that the
chemicals, called neurotransmitters, became inactivated when broken
down by enzymes, but Dr. Axelrod's work indicated that they were
actually pumped back into the nerve cells that had released them.

While some early antidepressants had already been developed, Dr.
Axelrod's research revolutionized the understanding of the way the
medications actually worked. Blocking or inhibiting the reuptake
process outlined by Dr. Axelrod later became crucial to the development
of a later generation of antidepressants, Dr. Snyder said.

Dr. Axelrod, who lost his left eye in a laboratory accident in 1938,
continued working at the mental health institute until 1984, when he
retired. Even afterward, however, he visited the laboratory frequently
and remained involved in various research projects. He received
numerous other professional honors and awards in addition to the Nobel,
and in 1996 the National Institutes of Health named him a scientist
emeritus.

Dr. Axelrod recognized early on that discoveries about the role and
functioning of neurotransmitters would significantly alter the
treatment of depression, anxiety and other psychiatric disorders.

Appearing at a 1987 news conference, he responded to a questioner who
asked whether Sigmund Freud was "dead."

"Not for people who want to spend their money on psychoanalysis," said
Dr. Axelrod, as reported in The Toronto Star, "but for the treatment of
severe mental illness, yes, he is."

Dr. Axelrod, whose wife died in 1992, is survived by two sons, Paul, of
Ripon, Wis., and Alfred, of Wausaukee, Wis., and three grandchildren.