Joseph L. Goldstein

Joseph L. Goldstein (b. 1940 in South Carolina) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985, along with fellow University of Texas researcher, Michael Brown, for their studies regarding cholesterol. They discovered that "human cells have low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood" and that when "LCL receptors are not present in sufficient numbers, individuals develop hypercholesteromeia" and become at risk for cholesterol related diseases. Their studies led to the development of statin drugs.

Goldstein received his BSci from Washington and Lee University in 1962, and his MD from Texas University's Southwestern Medical School in 1966. Upon completion of his residency, Goldstein moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he worked in biochemical genetics. In 1972, Goldstein relocated back to the Southwestern Medical Center, accepting a post as the head of the Division of Medical Genetics.

At the Southwestern Medical Center Goldstein collaborated extensively with Michael Brown, a fellow researcher at the center who had also worked at the NIH. From 1973 to 1985, Goldstein and Brown together published over one hundred major papers. They are both listed in Thomson Reuters’ index of highly cited authors.

In 1993, their postdoctoral trainees Wang Xiaodong and Michael Briggs purified the Sterol Regulatory Element-Binding Proteins (SREBPs), a family of membrane-bound transcription factors. Since 1993, Goldstein, Brown, and their colleagues have described the unexpectedly complex machinery that proteolytically releases the SREBPs from membranes, thus allowing their migration to the nucleus where they activate all the genes involved in the synthesis of cholesterol and fatty acids. The machinery for generating active SREBPs is tightly regulated by a negative feedback mechanism, which explains how cells maintain the necessary levels of fats and cholesterol in the face of varying environmental circumstances.

In 1988 Goldstein received a National Medal of Science in the field of molecular genetics, and in 2003 Goldstein and Brown won the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research in recognition for their further work in understanding cholesterol and also the discovery of an insulin-sensitive regulator, which potentially could be used to develop treatments for diabetes mellitus.

Goldstein was appointed as Chairman of the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards jury in 1995, and was a recipient of the award ten years earlier. Since 2000, Goldstein has authored a series of essays on the deep relationship between art and science that appear in the annual Nature Medicine supplement that accompanies the Lasker Awards.