Martin Rodbell

In 1950, Rodbell married Barbara Charlotte Ledermann. She was a friend of Ann Frank’s (the famous diarist) sister Margot. Although her parents and sister were gassed to death at Auschwitz, Charlotte was able to obtain an Aryan I Card through her contacts in the Dutch Underground and survive. The couple had four children - Paul, Suzanne, Andrew, and Phillip.

Towards the end of his life Rodbell began to suffer from cardiovascular disease. Yet, he was highly active. On 16 November, 1998 he delivered the inaugural NIEHS Rodbell Lecture. The next day he was admitted to the hospital and died on December 7, 1998 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Martin Rodbell was born on December 1, 1925 in Baltimore, Maryland into a Jewish family. His father, Milton Rodbell, was a grocer. His mother’s name was Shirley (née Abrams) Rodbell. He had one brother and one sister.

Rodbell started his education at a public school. Later he shifted to Baltimore City College, a magnet high school, which admitted selected students from the city and put more stress on languages than on science subjects.

As a result, he soon developed interest in languages, especially French. At the same time, his friendship with two neighborhood boys awakened in him a great interest in chemistry and mathematics.

Finally, after passing out from school in 1943, he joined John Hopkins University with chemistry and French existential literature. Soon he began to feel that being a Jew, fighting Hitler should be his highest priority. So in 1944, he joined the U.S. Navy as a radio operator.

His Corp was mainly engaged with the Japanese in the South Pacific. During this period, he had the opportunity to interact with the locals, living under trying conditions, in Philippines, Korea and China. This, in his own words, helped him grow a ‘healthy respect for the human condition’.

In 1954, soon after receiving his PhD, Rodbell joined University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a postdoctoral fellow. Here he worked on biosynthesis of the antibiotic chloramphenicol under Herbert E. Carter.

His fellowship period ended in 1956. By now, Rodbell had realized that he was not cut out for an academic career and research was his strong point.

Therefore, he accepted the position of research biochemist at National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. It was a part of the National Institutes of Health and Rodbell remained with the organization until his retirement in 1994.

Here he began to work on lipoproteins on the surface of chylomicrons. Using a newly developed ‘fingerprinting’ technique he detected at least five different proteins. Much later it was proved that these proteins had major roles in diseases involving lipoproteins.

In 1960, he decided to restart his original research on cell biology. Fortunately, he received a fellowship, which enabled him to join the University of Brussels. There he learned many new techniques. Among them, he found an ultrathin x-ray film process to record localization of tritium-labeled molecules inside the cells most interesting.

Rodbell is best remembered for his work on ‘signal transduction’ and discovery of G-protein. He established that the G-protein, present in the cell membrane, was the main factor that carries on theprocess of transduction.

Later he established that addition of G-proteins at the cell receptor could inhibit and activate transduction simultaneously. By this, he showed that cellular receptors were capable of having several processes going on at the same time.