Robert F. Furchgott life and biography

Robert F. Furchgott was a Nobel Prize-winning American biochemist.

Furchgott was born in Charleston, SC, to Arthur Furchgott (December 1884 - January 1971) and Pena Sorentrue Furchgott. He graduated with a degree in chemistry in 1937 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, received his Ph.D in biochemistry at Northwestern University in 1940. He was faculty member of Washington University School of Medicine from 1949 to 1956. From 1956 to 2009, he was professor of pharmacology at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.

Eric R. Kandel spent his childhood in Vienna, where he saw the violence wrought by Austria's pro-Nazi laws and the viciousness of Kristallnacht. His family narrowly escaped the country with nothing but their lives, only days before World War II began. Resettling in America, Kandel attended a public school in Brooklyn, later studied psychiatry, neurology, and biochemistry, and spent most of his career at Columbia University. In his most famous research, using sea slugs and mice, he showed the crucial role of synapses in memory and learning.

His wife, Denise Kandel, is a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University and chief of substance abuse epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She answered the phone when the Nobel Institute called at 5:00 one autumn morning in 2000, and said she was able to understand only her husband's name and the word "Stockholm". He shared that year's Nobel Prize in Medicine with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard, who conducted related research in their own laboratories. Kandel is also a co-founder of Memory Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company which researches diseases of the central nervous system.

Awards:

Dickson Prize 1982
Lasker Award 1983 (with V.B. Mountcastle)
National Medal of Science 1988
Wolf Prize in Medicine 1999
Nobel Prize for Medicine 2000 (with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard)
Naturalized US Citizen
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Philosophical Society
Federation of American Scientists Board of Sponsors
Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator (1984-)
National Academy of Sciences
Austrian Ancestry
Jewish Ancestry
Polish Ancestry
Ukrainian Ancestry

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