Ferid Murad Biography

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World of Anatomy and Physiology on Ferid Murad

Ferid Murad shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Robert Furchgott and Louis Ignarro, for his seminal investigations in the 1970s on nitro compounds and nitric oxide's biological effects.

He is the son of Jabir Murat Ejupi, an Albanian immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island in 1913, and was registered by the immigration officer under the name John Murad. His mother, Henrietta Josephine Bowman, was American, from Alton, Illinois. Ferid decided to become a physician when he was 12 years old. He received a Rector Scholarship at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana in 1954. While attending college, he also worked as a waiter, taught the anatomy and embryology labs, and worked at one and sometimes two jobs during the summer to cover his expenses. When he had only one summer job, he took extra summer classes at Indiana University and at DePauw. During both medical school and graduate school, Murad achieved the best grades of his class every year.

In 1957, Murad applied for a M.D.-Ph.D. combined degree program at Western Reserve University, which had being recently initiated at Cleveland. After being evaluated by the faculty of the pharmacology department in February of 1958, Ferid Murad was accepted in the program under Earl Sutherland, Jr. and Theodore Rall, who had discovered the previous year that cyclic AMP was the second messenger of epinephrine, as well as glucagon-mediated effects on glycogenolysis in liver preparations. Murad was assigned by his mentors with the task of demonstrating that the catecholamine effects on cyclic AMP formation resulted from events mediated by the beta-adrenergic receptors. The outcome of his research was the demonstration of beta-adrenergic-mediated effects on the activation of the enzyme adenylil cyclase in both heart and liver preparations. He also found that acetylcholine and other cholinergic agents inhibited adenylil cyclase preparations, which constituted the first demonstration that hormones inhibited cyclic AMP formation. These results made him interested in the further identification of other agents that could prevent cyclic AMP from activating the phosphorylase and phosphorylase kinase enzymes. His group of research also succeeded in demonstrating that several hormones, such as catecholamines, cholinergics, ACTH, vasopressin, among others, could modulate (i.e., increase or decrease) cyclic AMP synthesis, by interfering with the activity of adenylil cyclase.

Murad spent the period between 1965 and 1967 at Massachusetts General Hospital as an intern and medical resident, and returned to lab work in 1967 at the National Institutes of Health as clinical associate in Martha Vaughan's laboratory at the Heart Institute. Here, among other researches, he was able to continue his studies on cyclic AMP and hormonal regulation, until he was invited by the University of Virginia to develop the new clinical pharmacology division in the Department of Medicine, and was appointed associate professor in medicine and pharmacology. Murad remained at the University of Virginia until 1981, when he was appointed to the position of Director of the Clinical Research Center in 1971 and Director of Clinical Pharmacology in 1973, before being promoted to professor in 1975, at the age of 39. He designed a research program that included clinical and basic research, and formed a team of investigators comprised of talented students and fellows. Murad and his collaborators conducted the first experiments on the biological effects of nitric oxide gas, which were published in 1977.

In 1981, Murad went to Stanford University as chief of medicine of the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, also accumulating the position of professor of medicine and pharmacology and associate chairman of medicine. He left Stanford in 1988 to become vice president at Abbot Laboratories where he directed the pharmaceutical discovery and development programs for four years. Aside from contributing to the discovery of many new drug targets, his team of about 1,500 scientists succeeded in carrying out clinical trials for 24 new compounds for several diseases. Meanwhile, Murad was also working with a group of 20 scientists on nitric oxide gas and cyclic AMP, under two National Institutes of Health extramural grants. In 1993, Murad left Abbot to found and head a new biotechnology company, Molecular Geriatrics Corporation; but in 1997, he decided to accept an invitation to become the first chairman of a newly combined basic science department of integrative biology, pharmacology and physiology at the University of Texas in Houston. Murad remains in Houston, where he continues his research on nitric oxide and molecular signaling.