Alfred Goodman Gilman is known for discovering, along with Martin Rodbell, new proteins in biological cells, called G-proteins. For this discovery they shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology. Communication between cells has been understood for a long time, but how signals were transmitted inside the cells was not known until Gilman and Rodbell found the inter-cellular proteins. G-proteins are important because disruption of their function can lead to disease.

Gilman was born in 1941 in New Haven, Connecticut, the same year his father, Alfred Gilman Sr., published the landmark textbook, The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, along with Louis Goodman, while they were faculty members of Yale's pharmacology department. Gilman grew up in White Plains, New York, where his father was on the faculty of The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and then later a founding chairman of the Pharmacology Department at the new Albert...