Office of NIH History

Nobel Laureate Bob Lefkowitz will review his dual career as a physician and a scientist with an emphasis on how the NIH "Yellow Beret" experience in the 1960s entirely changed the trajectory of hundreds of careers like his.

Dr. Lefkowitz is the James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at the Duke University Medical Center. Among his many accomplishments, Dr. Lefkowitz transformed the understanding of what had by then become known as G protein coupled receptors when he cloned the gene for the beta2-adrenergic receptor. Today, more than half of all prescription drug sales are of drugs that target either directly or indirectly the receptors discovered by Dr. Lefkowitz and his colleagues.

Dr. Lefkowitz's career path had taken a major turn when he came to the NIH in 1968 as a recent medical school graduate to fulfill his military draft requirement in the NIH Associates Training Program. Participants in this program were known as the Yellow Berets for their avoidance of combat duty in the Vietnam War.

For his May 26 lecture, the affable Dr. Lefkowitz will reminisce about his dual career as a physician and a scientist with an emphasis on how the Yellow Beret experience in the 1960s radically changed the trajectory of his and hundreds of others' careers.

The ONHM biomedical history lecture series provides thoughtful examinations of past success and failures to guide our future. The following speaker in the series will be Sarah Leavitt, Ph.D., an historian previously with the National Building Museum, on June 24, discussing history of St. Elizabeths, the first federally operated psychiatric hospital in the United States.

For more information go to https://history.nih.gov