Neurotransmission in Health and Disease

For seminal contributions to our understanding of neurotransmission and neurodegeneration.

Oleh Hornykiewicz was born in Sychiw, then Poland, now Ukraine, in 1926. He studied medicine in Vienna, Austria, and received his M.D. from the University of Vienna in 1951.

Hornykiewicz began his academic and research career in the Department of Pharmacology of the University of Vienna in 1951, where he was promoted to Univ.-Docent in 1964. From 1956 to 1958, he held a British Council research scholarship at the Department of Pharmacology of the University of Oxford, England. In 1967 he moved from Vienna to Toronto, Canada, to become Head of the Department of Psychopharmacology at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry and full Professor of Pharmacology and Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

In 1976, Hornykiewicz moved to Vienna, Austria, as Professor and Head of the newly founded Institute of Biochemical Pharmacology of the University of Vienna.  Maintaining his ties with the University of Toronto, he established, in 1978, the "Human Brain Laboratory", a new research section at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, which he directed until retirement ( professor emeritus, University of Toronto), in 1992. At the University of Vienna, Hornykiewicz retired as professor emeritus in 1995.

Hornykiewicz´s research has centered on neurotransmitter function in normal and diseased human brain , with special emphasis on Parkinson´s disease and other basal ganglia disorders. In 1960, he discovered the severe dopamine deficiency in the brain of patients with Parkinson´s disease and initiated, in 1961, the first clinical trials of levodopa to treat this disorder. For his work in this area, on which he has extensively published,  Hornykiewicz has received numerous honours, prizes and distinctions.

Hornykiewicz has been member of Scientific/Research/Medical Advisory Boards of 13 Research Foundations and he is honorary member of several professional societies. He is full elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Presently he is Distinguished Professor of Brain Disorders Research at the University of Saskatchewan at Saskatoon, Canada.

Hornykiewicz was instrumental in founding the Center of Brain Research at  the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna, now Medical University of Vienna, where he continues to pursue his interests in human brain research.

For seminal contributions to our understanding of neurotransmission and neurodegeneration.

Roger Nicoll received his medical training at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and his research training at the National Institutes of Health.  Following work with Nobel laureate John Eccles he joined the University of California at San Francisco where he has remained. He has used in vitro brain slice preparations to define the numerous neurotransmitters that mediated synaptic transmission and characterized how these neurotransmitters control neuronal excitability and plasticity. More recently he has discovered a family of auxiliary receptor proteins that are essential for the activity dependent trafficking of synaptic glutamate receptors, a process thought to underlie certain forms of learning and memory. For his contributions he has received numerous awards including election to the National Academy of Science.

For seminal contributions to our understanding of neurotransmission and neurodegeneration.

Born in Washington, D.C. in December 1938, Dr. Snyder received his undergraduate and medical training at Georgetown University (MD 1962); Research Associate training with Julius Axelrod at the NIH (1963-1965); and  psychiatric training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital (1965-1968).  In 1966 he joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Asst Professor Pharmacology, 1966-1968; Associate Professor Pharmacology/Psychiatry (1968-1970); Professor (1970).  In 1980 he established the Department of Neuroscience and served as Director (1980-2006).  He is presently Distinguished Service Professor of Neuroscience, Pharmacology and Psychiatry.

Many advances in molecular neuroscience have stemmed from Dr. Snyder's identification of receptors for neurotransmitters and drugs and elucidation of the actions of psychotropic agents.  He pioneered the labeling of receptors by reversible ligand binding in the identification of opiate receptors and extended this technique to all the major neurotransmitter receptors in the brain.  In characterizing each new group of receptors, he also elucidated actions of major neuroactive drugs.  The isolation and subsequent cloning of receptor proteins stems from the ability to label, and thus monitor, receptors by these ligand binding techniques.  The application of Dr. Snyder's techniques has enhanced the development of new agents in the pharmaceutical industry by enabling rapid screening of large numbers of candidate drugs.  Dr. Snyder applied receptor techniques to elucidate intracellular messenger systems including isolation of inositol 1,4,5,-trisphosphate receptors and elucidation of inositol pyrophosphates as phosphorylating agents.  He has established gases as a new class of neurotransmitters, beginning with his demonstrating the role of nitric oxide in mediating glutamate synaptic transmission and neurotoxicity.  His isolation and molecular cloning of nitric oxide synthase led to major insights into the neurotransmitter functions of nitric oxide throughout the body.  Subsequently, he established carbon monoxide as another gaseous transmitter and D-serine as a glial derived endogenous ligand of glutamate-NMDA receptors.

Dr. Snyder is the recipient of numerous professional honors, including the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical Research (1978), the National Medal of Science (2005); the Albany Medical Prize (2007), Honorary Doctor of Science degrees from Northwestern University (1981), Georgetown University (1986), Ben Gurion University (1990), Albany Medical College (1998), Technion University of Israel (2002), Mount Sinai Medical School (2004), University of Maryland  (2006), Charles University, Prague (2009), Ohio State University (2011); the Wolf Foundation Prize in Medicine (1983), the Dickson Prize of the University of Pittsburgh (1983), the Bower Award of the Franklin Institute (1991), the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Neuroscience Research (1996) and the Gerard Prize of the Society for Neuroscience (2000).  He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.  He is the author of more than 1000 journal articles and several books including Uses of Marijuana (1971), Madness and the Brain (1974), The Troubled Mind (1976), Biological Aspects of Abnormal Behavior (1980), Drugs and the Brain (1986), and Brainstorming (1989).