On Friday 31 Dec 2004 12:41, Meir Weiss wrote:
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I speak batchi, so here's the translation:-

Nobel Prize Winner Julius Axelrod

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 30, 2004; Page B07

Julius Axelrod, 92, the National Institute of Mental Health neuroscientist who
shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for showing "how nerves talk
to each other," died Dec. 29 at his home in Rockville. He had heart trouble
in recent years.

A basket maker's son, Dr. Axelrod got a late start in the career that would
bring him renown. He spent years as a biochemist in a food-testing laboratory
before he focused on neuroscience, the study of nerves and their relation to
behavior and learning. Described as a modest and brilliant man, he only
sought a doctorate at the urging of colleagues -- and he completed it in a
matter of months of night classes.

In 1970, Dr. Axelrod shared the Nobel with Sir Bernard Katz of the United
Kingdom and Ulf von Euler of Sweden. The scientists discovered the way
chemicals released by nerve endings in the brain affect behavior, from sleep
to unruliness. The work had massive ramifications for development of drugs
and for psychiatry, especially in the treatment of mental illness. Among the
drugs their work helped spur were such selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitors as Prozac.

As Dr. Axelrod told Robert Kanigel for his book "Apprentice to Genius: The
Making of a Scientific Dynasty," he did not hear of his Nobel victory until
he arrived at a dental appointment that morning. He was running late, he
said, and had not listened to the radio report. The dentist told him he had
won the prize.

"In what?" the scientist asked.

"Peace," said the dentist.

"Then I knew he was kidding," Dr. Axelrod said.

He said he quickly drove to his lab and could not find a place to park,
finally deciding, "the hell with it," and abandoned his car at the building
entrance. When President Richard M. Nixon placed a congratulatory phone call,
Dr. Axelrod said he made an appeal to reduce proposed federal budget cuts in
research funding.

He was an unmistakable figure. For decades, he wore glasses with a darkened
lens over his left eye -- after an accident in 1938 in which a bottle of
ammonia exploded. "I used to wear a black patch over my eye when I was
young," he once said. "It was very dashing, like Brenda Starr's husband."

Dr. Axelrod was born May 30, 1912, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was
a 1933 biology graduate of City College of New York. Shortly after, he
claimed, he was rejected from medical schools because of quotas on Jewish
students. "I wasn't that good a student," he added, "but if my name was
Bigelow I probably would have gotten in."

He received a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941
and a doctorate in pharmacology from George Washington University in 1955.

In the 1940s, he worked with his mentor, the famed drug researcher Bernard
"Steve" Brodie, at Goldwater Memorial Hospital in New York and at the
National Institutes of Health. They made key contributions to the chemistry
of analgesic, or pain-relieving, medications.

In 1948 and 1949, he wrote two papers with Brodie that established that the
active ingredient in the popular headache remedy known as APC (aspirin,
phenacetin and caffeine) was a new substance called acetaminophen, which
Johnson & Johnson developed as Tylenol, said Dr. Solomon H. Snyder, director
of Johns Hopkins University medical school's neuroscience department.

There were also several disputes, chronicled in Kanigel's book, about
overlapping work for which Dr. Axelrod believed he deserved more credit. It
prompted his leaving Brodie's lab and working on a doctorate to earn the
credentials that would lead to an independent lab.

Dr. Axelrod said von Euler began the early work that led to their joint
recognition by the Nobel committee. Von Euler had shown that the chemical
noradrenaline is a neurotransmitter, which carries messages between nerve
cells. Terminating the actions of neurotransmitters is of major importance.
Dr. Axelrod discovered that the actions of noradrenaline and most other
neurotransmitters are terminated by a pump that transports the
neurotransmitter back into the nerve that had released it.

He also discovered the enzyme catechol-o-methyltransferase, which helps
inactivate noradrenaline.

After winning the Nobel, he received many requests for help from average
citizens.

"You get all kinds of letters from very sick people who want help -- some
schizophrenics," he told The Washington Post in 1978. "It's very sad. They're
always unhappy people who can't be helped, although there are anti-psychotic
drugs which can be used. I write them a nice letter, saying I'm not a doctor
and that they should see a psychiatrist. People are so desperate. They grasp
at any straw, even a little item in a newspaper about me."

He was chief of the National Institute of Mental Health's pharmacology section
from 1955 until he retired in 1984. As a scientist emeritus, he continued to
direct research and study neurotransmitters.

A soft-spoken and wry-humored man, he said the esteem he received with the
Nobel came at a price, notably that "people read my papers more carefully."
He received an overwhelming number of invitations to speak but needed a way
to winnow them. "I accept the ones I'm interested in, or," he said, "the ones
in Paris. I love Paris."

His wife of 53 years, Sally Taub Axelrod, died in 1992.

Survivors include two sons, Paul Axelrod of Ripon, Wis., and Alfred Axelrod of
Wausaukee, Wis.; and three grandchildren.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company