Brandeis University alumnus Roderick MacKinnon receives the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Released on October 08, 2003
Contact: Contact: Cristin Carr (781)736-4203

MacKinnon, '78, is also the recipient of this year's Alumni Achievement Award at Brandeis and the university's prestigious Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award

Roderick MacKinnon, who graduated from Brandeis magna cum laude in 1978, receiving his bachelor's degree with high honors in biochemistry, is this year's recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Honored for revealing the process of electrical signaling in humans and other living organisms, he shares the prize with Peter Agre, M.D., at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

MacKinnon returned to Brandeis in 1986, choosing to continue postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of his undergraduate mentor Christopher Miller, professor of biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. With Miller he began working on biophysical aspects of ion channel function - focusing on the protein selective for potassium ions. He then began his independent research career at Harvard Medical School in 1989, moving to Rockefeller University in 1996 as professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics.

BHe was introduced to ion channels as a postdoc in my lab and the rest is history,B said Miller. BFrom there, he continued to rise rapidly, becoming a young star of the field because he was doing such novel and creative research.B

Also appointed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, MacKinnon was chosen for this year's Brandeis Alumni Achievement Award and is a recipient of Brandeis's Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in the Basic Medical Sciences. He joins the extraordinary lineage of Rosenstiel winners - 12 of whom have now gone on to win Nobel prizes.

A native of Melrose, Mass., MacKinnon's early work employed close biophysical analysis of ion channel behavior to establish the overall molecular construction of the family of voltage-gated ion channels. This work revealed the basic architecture of the protein pores that select among sodium, potassium, and calcium ions. His more recent turn to x-ray crystallography has yielded the first high-resolution structure of a specific ion channel, the bacterial potassium channel, and with it the first atomic-level understanding of the structural basis of ion selectivity in ion channel proteins.

BFor the first time, MacKinnon showed us the three dimensional shape of ion channel proteins, the basic molecular hardware of the nervous system,B said Miller. B He is being honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating a better understanding about these proteins B proteins that are responsible for making electricity in nerve cells and therefore underlie all thought, sensation and emotion.B

Prior to postdoctoral work at Brandeis, MacKinnon earned a medical degree from Tufts University in 1982. MacKinnon's many achievements include solving the molecular structure of the potassium ion channel - an accomplishment hailed by Science magazine as one of its "Breakthroughs of the Year."

MacKinnon's contributions to science have previously been recognized with a Pew Scholarship and a McKnight Scholars Award in 1992, the Biophysical Society's Young Investigator Award in 1995, the McKnight Investigator Award in 1997, and the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1998. MacKinnon was also named a recipient of the 1999 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the nation's most distinguished honor for outstanding contributions to basic and clinical medical research. He was elected to membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2000, received the 2001 Gairdner Award, and was honored with the inaugural Hodgkin-Huxley-Katz Prize by the British Physiological Society in 2000. He is also a member of the Pels Family Center for Biochemistry and Structural Biology and the F.M. Kirby Center for Sensory Neuroscience.

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Read the Associated Press story out of Stockholm

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The Boston Globe

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