Richard Axel

He is married to Cornelia ‘Cori’ Bargmann, fellow scientist and neurobiologist.

Richard Axel was born to Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York. He spent his childhood playing basketball and stickball on the streets of Brooklyn.

At the age of eleven, he started working for a dentist and his job was to deliver false teeth. He continued to do many odd jobs like laying carpets and working at restaurants.

He attended the Stuyvesant High School, a school known for its well-organised and established academic programs. Here, he played basketball and was also exposed to art, music and opera.

In 1967, he graduated from Columbia University. Here, he worked as a Research Assistant in the laboratory of Bernard Weinstein, a Professor of Medicine, and became immensely interested in genetics.

In 1971, he received an MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore. Later that year, he joined the laboratory of Sol Spiegelman, a professor in the Department of Genetics at Columbia University.

In 1972, he began his second post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, where he worked with Gary Felsenfeld on DNA and chromatin structure.

In 1974, he returned to Columbia University as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cancer Research, where he researched on ‘the structure of genes in chromatin’.

In 1978, he became a full-time professor of pathology and biochemistry at Columbia University.

On May 1, 1978, in collaboration with his colleagues, Angel Pellicer, Michael Wigler and Saul J. Silverstein, he published his first paper titled ‘The transfer and stable integration of the HSV thymidine kinase gene into mouse cells’.

In 1980, along with microbiologist Saul J. Silverstein and geneticist Michael H. Wigler, he filed for ‘Axel Patent’, a path-breaking discovery in DNA transfection.

His seminal paper on ‘olfactory receptors’ was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004. His research laid the foundation for genetic and molecular analysis, which is used by a number of pharmaceutical laboratories and scientists around the world.

In 1983, along with his colleagues he founded the ‘Axel Patents’, a technique of genetically engineering cells. The royalties from this patented discovery has raised an estimated $600 million. The proteins obtained from this technology have been used in many pharmaceutical drugs.