A chemist and pharmacologist, in the 1940s Axelrod was asked to figure out why a popular headache remedy caused terrible side effects in some users. He not only isolated the problem, he determined which ingredient was effective for treating headaches: acetaminophen (also known as paracetamol), now the active ingredient in Tylenol.
He also studied how the liver metabolized drugs, and discovered the hormone melatonin. But he’s best known for his work on a team of scientists who studied how neurotransmitters — brain chemicals — worked to affect mood, leading directly to refined anti-depressant drugs called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil); he shared a Nobel Prize for Medicine for the work.
“His contributions to pharmacology, especially in terms of how drugs act in the brain, were extraordinary,” says Dr. Solomon Snyder, director of the neuroscience department at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “In fact, the work for which he got the Nobel Prize was just a tiny percentage of his scientific output.” Dr. Axelrod died at home December 29. He was 92.