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Ferid Murad, (b. September 14, 1936, Whiting, Indiana — d. September 4, 2023, Menlo Park, California), American pharmacologist who, along with Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro, was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that nitric oxide (NO) acts as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system. Their combined work uncovered an entirely new mechanism for how blood vessels in the body relax and widen.
Ferid Murad was born in Whiting, Indiana, on September 14, 1936. His parents were Henrietta Josephine Bowman of Alton, Illinois, and Xhabir Murat Ejupi, an Albanian immigrant from Gostivar in present-day North Macedonia, who subsequently changed his name to John Murad after being processed at Ellis Island in 1913. His mother was from a Baptist family family and ran away from home in 1935, aged 17, to marry Murad's father, who was 39 and Muslim. Murad was the oldest of three boys. Murad and his brothers were raised as Catholics. He was later baptized an Episcopalian while in college. The family owned a small restaurant while Murad was growing up, and he spent his youth working at the family business.
In the eighth grade, he was asked to write an essay of his top three career choices, which he indicated as physician, teacher and pharmacist (in 1948, clinical pharmacology was not yet a discipline in medicine). He became a board-certified physician and internist doing both basic and clinical research with considerable teaching in medicine, pharmacology and clinical pharmacology and with a PhD in pharmacology.
Murad competed successfully for a Rector Scholarship at DePauw, University in Greencastle, Indiana a small and excellent liberal arts university on a tuition scholarship. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the pre-med program at DePauw University in 1958. During his senior year of college, he began to apply to medical schools when his faculty advisor Forst Fuller, a professor in the biology department suggested that he consider a new MD-PhD program at Case Western Reserve University. A fraternity brother, Bill Sutherland, also advised that he consider this new combined degree program that his father, Earl Sutherland, Jr. initiated in Cleveland in 1957. The program paid full tuition for both degrees and provided a modest stipend of $2,000 per year. Murad ultimately decided to attend and became an early graduate of the first explicit MD and pharmacology Ph.D. program (which would later lead to the development of the prestigious Medical Scientist Training Program) obtaining his degrees from Case Western Reserve University in 1965. He was an Intern in Internal Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital (1965–66), Resident in Internal Medicine (1966–67), Clinical Associate and Senior Assistant Surgeon, Public Health Service, National Heart and Lung Institute (1967–69) and Senior Staff Fellow there from 1969–70.
In addition to his clinical practice, Murad taught pharmacology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville (1975–81), at Stanford University (1981–89), and then at Northwestern University (1988). While at Stanford he ventured into the private sector as a vice president of Abbott Laboratories (1988–92) and then became president of the Molecular Geriatrics Corporation (1993–95). He began teaching at the medical school of the University of Texas, Houston, in 1997. Murad moved to the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 2011.
In 1977, Murad showed that nitroglycerin and several related heart drugs induce the formation of nitric oxide and that the colorless, odorless gas acts to increase the diameter of blood vessels in the body. Furchgott and Ignarro built on this work. About 1980 Furchgott demonstrated that cells in the endothelium, or inner lining, of blood vessels produce an unknown signaling molecule, which he named endothelium-derived relaxing factor (EDRF). This molecule signals smooth muscle cells in blood vessel walls to relax, dilating the vessels. Ignarro’s research, conducted in 1986 and done independently of Furchgott’s work, identified EDRF as nitric oxide. These discoveries led to the development of the anti-impotence drug sildenafil citrate (Viagra) and had the potential to unlock new approaches for understanding and treating other diseases.
The Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which presented the prize, said that the identification of a biological role for nitric oxide was surprising for several reasons. Nitric oxide was known mainly as a harmful air pollutant, released into the atmosphere from automobile engines and other combustion sources. In addition, it was a simple molecule, very different from the complex neurotransmitters and other signaling molecules that regulate many biological events. No other gas is known to act as a signaling molecule in the body.
Murad was also the recipient of the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1996 for his discovery. Murad and Ignarro collaborated on Nitric Oxide: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Therapeutic Implications (1995).
Ferid Murad died in Menlo Park, California, on September 4, 2023, at the age of 86.
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Ferid Murad (September 14, 1936 – September 4, 2023) was an American physician and pharmacologist, and a co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Ferid Murad was born in Whiting, Indiana, on September 14, 1936. His parents were Henrietta Josephine Bowman of Alton, Illinois, and Xhabir Murat Ejupi, an Albanian immigrant from Gostivar in present-day North Macedonia.[1][2][3] who subsequently changed his name to John Murad after being processed at Ellis Island in 1913. His mother was from a Baptist family and ran away from home in 1935, aged 17, to marry his father, who was 39 and Muslim.[2] Murad is the oldest of three boys. Murad and his brothers were raised as Catholics. He was later baptized an Episcopalian while in college. The family owned a small restaurant while Murad was growing up, and he spent his youth working at the family business.[2]
In the eighth grade, he was asked to write an essay of his top three career choices, which he indicated as physician, teacher and pharmacist (in 1948, clinical pharmacology was not yet a discipline in medicine). He was a board-certified physician and internist doing both basic and clinical research with considerable teaching in medicine, pharmacology and clinical pharmacology and with a PhD in pharmacology.
Murad competed successfully for a Rector Scholarship at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, a small and excellent liberal arts university on a tuition scholarship. He received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the pre-med program at DePauw University in 1958. During his senior year of college he began to apply to medical schools when his faculty advisor Forst Fuller, a professor in the biology department suggested that he consider a new MD-PhD program at Case Western Reserve University. A fraternity brother, Bill Sutherland, also advised that he consider this new combined degree program that his father Earl Sutherland, Jr initiated in Cleveland in 1957. The program paid full tuition for both degrees and provided a modest stipend of $2,000 per year. Murad ultimately decided to attend and became an early graduate of the first explicit MD and pharmacology Ph.D. program (which would later lead to the development of the prestigious Medical Scientist Training Program) obtaining his degrees from Case Western Reserve University in 1965. He was an Intern in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (1965–66), Resident in Internal Medicine (1966–67), Clinical Associate and Senior Assistant Surgeon, Public Health Service, National Heart and Lung Institute (1967–69) and Senior Staff Fellow there from 1969–70.
Murad began his academic career by joining the University of Virginia, where he was made associate professor, Depts. of Internal Medicine and Pharmacology, School of Medicine in 1970, before becoming a full professor in 1975. From 1971–81 he was Director, Clinical Research Center, UVA School of Medicine and Director, Division of Clinical Pharmacology, Dept. of Internal Medicine, UVA School of Medicine (1973–81). Murad moved to Stanford University in 1981 where he was Chief of Medicine at the Palo Alto VA Medical Center (1981–86), Associate Chairman, Dept. of Medicine, Stanford University (1984–86), and Acting Chairman, Dept. of Medicine and Acting Division Chief, Division of Respiratory Medicine from 1986–88. In 1988 he was the American Heart Association, Ciba Award Recipient. Murad left his tenure at Stanford in 1988 for a position at Abbott Laboratories, where he served as a Vice President of Pharmaceutical Discovery until founding his own biotechnology company, the Molecular Geriatrics Corporation, in 1993. Murad went back to academics and joined the University of Texas Medical School at Houston to create a new department of integrative biology, pharmacology, and physiology in 1997. There, he was the chairman of Integrative Biology and Pharmacology, professor and director emeritus of The Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Disease, John S. Dunn Distinguished Chair in Physiology and Medicine, deputy director of The Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine, and later a professor at the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine. In April 2011, he moved to the George Washington University as a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.[4]
Murad's key research demonstrated that nitroglycerin and related drugs worked by releasing nitric oxide into the body, which relaxed smooth muscle by elevating intracellular cyclic GMP. The missing steps in the signaling process were filled in by Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro of UCLA, 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). In 1999, Murad and Furchgott received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[5] He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences among other notable societies.
In 2015, Murad signed the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change on the final day of the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. The declaration was signed by a total of 76 Nobel Laureates and handed to then-President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the successful COP21 climate summit in Paris.[6]
Murad was editing a book series published by Bentham Science Publishers titled Herbal medicine: Back to the Future; two volumes of which have already been published and a third volume was in preparation.[7]
Ferid Murad died in Menlo Park, California, on September 4, 2023, at the age of 86.[8][9]
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Ferid Murad, Nobelist Who Saw How a Gas Can Aid the Heart, Dies at 86
An American pharmacologist, he delved into the effects of nitric oxide, work that led to advances in treating heart disease, hypertension and erectile dysfunction.
Ferid Murad, a pharmacologist whose research into the effects of nitric oxide on the heart and blood vessels enabled widespread advancements in the treatment of cardiovascular disease, hypertension and erectile dysfunction, and which earned him a share in a Nobel Prize in 1998, died on Monday at his home in Menlo Park, Calif. He was 86.
His son, Joe Murad, confirmed the death. The cause was not immediately known.
Doctors had been prescribing nitroglycerin for angina and other heart ailments for over a century — including, coincidentally, to Alfred Nobel, who founded the Nobel Prizes.
But no one knew exactly how it worked. And no one suspected that the active agent could be nitric oxide, a cancer-causing free radical most often associated with pollution (and not to be confused with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas).
Dr. Murad, who began his work while teaching at the University of Virginia, made his discovery in part by accident.
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He already knew that an enzyme, cyclic guanosine monophosphate, stimulated blood flow. But he wanted to know how. He tried different approaches using blood-vessel tissue, which, following usual procedure, he fixed with a toxic substance that contained nitric oxide.
He noticed that the substance unexpectedly caused the tissue to expand. It didn’t take long to conclude that the nitric oxide was responsible.
Louis J. Ignarro, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, made a similar discovery around the same time, and not long after Robert F. Furchgott, at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, had attacked the question from a different angle, hypothesizing that some sort of signaling agent was responsible for regulating blood flow. The answer, they all decided, was nitric oxide.
Their discovery was not initially embraced by the medical community.
“People just didn’t want to believe that this free radical could act like this,” Dr. Murad told Texas Monthly in 1999. “Nitric oxide was known for destroying things.”
The researchers, working separately but in close communication, pressed ahead, and by the end of the 1980s had established that nitric oxide worked as a sort of signaling agent in the cardiovascular system, similar to hormones or neurotransmitters.
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The discovery made possible a wide variety of drugs, most famously Viagra, which facilitates erections by increasing blood flow to the penis. It also saved the lives of countless premature babies, whose underdeveloped lungs needed stimulation, and patients with cardiovascular disease, which restricts blood flow.
In 1996, Dr. Murad and Dr. Furchtgott won the Lasker Award, a prize for medical research often seen as a precursor to winning the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine. They won the Nobel two years later, along with Dr. Ignarro.
After Dr. Murad received the phone call from Stockholm informing him that he had won, he told The New York Times that he had “pondered the odds and thought that maybe I could win the prize, if not now maybe in a couple of years.” Still, he said, he was surprised to receive the Nobel. “When it happens, it’s incredible.”
Ferid Murad was born on Sept. 14, 1936, in a small apartment over a bakery in Whiting, Ind. His father, John Murad, was born in Albania as Jabir Murat Ejupi, only to have his name altered by an immigration officer when he arrived at Ellis Island in 1913.
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He and Dr. Murad’s mother, Henrietta (Bowman) Murad, ran a restaurant where Ferid and his two brothers, John and Turhon, worked from an early age — first as dishwashers, then as waiters. All three went on to earn doctoral degrees.
Ferid, known to his friends as Fred, studied pre-med and chemistry at DePauw University. A few weeks after he graduated, in 1958, he married Carol Leopold.
Along with their son, she survives him, as do their daughters, Christy Kuret, Carrie Rogers, Marianne Delmissier and Julie Birnbaum, and nine grandchildren.
Dr. Murad was among the first students in a new M.D./Ph.D. program at Case Western University in Cleveland; he graduated with degrees in medicine and pharmacology in 1965. To make money on the side, he delivered babies at the nearby Cleveland Clinic.
He conducted his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and later worked at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Virginia and Stanford University.
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He also spent nearly a decade, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the private sector, working first as a vice president at Abbott Laboratories and then as the founding president of Molecular Geriatrics, a medical research company. But he grew homesick for the academic lab, and moved to the University of Texas Medical School at Houston in 1997 and was affiliated with it when he won his share of the Nobel.
He later worked at George Washington University and returned to Stanford as an adjunct professor in 2016.
Dr. Murad continued working on nitric oxide and the human body, submitting a grant proposal just weeks before his death. And he remained astounded at the scope of the field of research he had helped open.
“There was a time when I could read all the papers and keep up with the field,” he said in a 2022 lecture. “But now it’s impossible.”
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