Michael S. Brown

Michael Stuart Brown is an American geneticist, born on 13 April 1941, who shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Joseph L. Goldstein for describing how the body regulates cholesterol metabolism. He took his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and then moved to what is now the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he and Goldstein found that human cells carry low-density lipoprotein receptors that pull cholesterol out of the bloodstream. A shortage of these receptors is implicated in familial hypercholesterolemia, and the work also revealed receptor-mediated endocytosis as a basic process of cell biology. Their findings led to the development of statin drugs, which are now among the most widely prescribed medicines in the United States. From 1993 he and Goldstein and their colleagues went on to describe the machinery of the sterol regulatory element binding proteins, through which cells keep fat and cholesterol levels in balance. He received the National Medal of Science in 1988.