AXELROD, JULIUS

born May 30, 1912, New York, N.Y., U.S. American biochemist and pharmacologist who, along with the British biophysicist Sir Bernard Katz and the Swedish physiologist Ulf von Euler, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1970. Axelrod's contribution was his identification of an enzyme that degrades chemical neurotransmitters within the nervous system after they are no longer needed to transmit nerve impulses. A graduate of the College of the City of New York (B.S., 1933), New York University (M.S., 1941), and George Washington University (Ph.D., 1955), Axelrod worked as chemist in the Laboratory of Industrial Hygiene (193546) and then joined the research division of Goldwater Memorial Hospital (1946), leaving in 1949 to join the staff of the section on chemical pharmacology at the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, Md. In 1955 he moved to the staff of the National Institute of Mental Health, where he became chief of the pharmacology section of the Laboratory of Clinical Sciences. Axelrod's achievement grew out of work done by Euler, specifically Euler's discovery of noradrenaline (norepinephrine), a chemical substance that transmits nerve impulses. Axelrod, in turn, discovered that noradrenaline could be neutralized by an enzyme, catechol-o-methyl transferase, which he isolated and named. This enzyme proved critical to an understanding of the entire nervous system. The enzyme was shown to be useful in dealing with the effects of certain psychotropic drugs and in research on hypertension and schizophrenia.