Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr.

Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr. was an American pharmacologist and biochemist, born in Burlingame, Kansas, on 19 November 1915; he died on 9 March 1974. He is remembered for research on how hormones act on cells, above all epinephrine, which he showed works through a second messenger, cyclic adenosine monophosphate, usually shortened to cyclic AMP. In 1971 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries concerning the mechanisms of the action of hormones. The prize recognised a researcher whose findings explained how a signal arriving at a cell is relayed inside it by a small messenger molecule, as the lead of his encyclopedia article describes.