Joseph L. Goldstein

Joseph Leonard Goldstein is an American biochemist and physician-scientist, born on 18 April 1940, who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his Texas colleague Michael Brown for discoveries concerning the regulation of cholesterol metabolism. Trained at Washington and Lee University and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, he spent his early career at the National Institutes of Health in biochemical genetics before returning to Southwestern in 1972 to head its Division of Medical Genetics. With Brown he showed that human cells carry receptors for low-density lipoprotein that pull cholesterol out of the blood, and that people who lack enough working receptors develop familial hypercholesterolemia and a high risk of coronary heart disease. Their work underlay the later development of statin drugs, and their later studies of the SREBP family of membrane-bound transcription factors explained how cells keep cholesterol and fatty acid synthesis in balance. He chairs the Department of Molecular Genetics at Southwestern, has trained many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and has chaired the jury of the Lasker Awards.