Ferid Murad

Ferid Murad (born September 14, 1936) is an Albanian-American physician and pharmacologist, and a co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was born in Whiting, Indiana to John Murad (born Xhabir Murat Ejupi), an Albanian and Henrietta Bowman, an American. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the pre-med program at DePauw University in 1958, and MD and pharmacology Ph.D. degrees from Case Western Reserve University in 1965; an early graduate of the first Medical Scientist Training Program to be developed. He then joined the University of Virginia, where he was made professor in 1970, before moving to Stanford in 1981. Murad left his tenure at Stanford in 1998 for a position at Abbott Laboratories, where he served as a vice president until starting his own biotechnology company, the Molecular Geriatrics Corporation, in 1993. The company experienced financial difficulties, and in 1997 Murad joined the University of Texas to create a new department of integrative biology, pharmacology, and physiology. He now continues at the University of Texas as Director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine and holds the John S. Dunn Distinguished Chair in Physiology and Medicine.

Murad's key research demonstrated that nitroglycerin and related drugs worked by releasing nitric oxide into the body, which acted as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system, making blood vessels dilate. The missing steps in the signaling process were filled in by Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro, for which the three shared the 1998 Nobel Prize (and for which Murad and Furchgott received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1996). There was some criticism, however, of the Nobel committee's decision not to award the prize to Salvador Moncada, who had independently reached the same results as Ignarro.