STOCKHOLM -- One of two American researchers to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday is a Stanford University professor who moonlighted on weekends to keep up his mortgage in case he failed as researcher.
But Dr. Brian Kobilka's studies of tiny sensors on the surface of cells that alert the body to outside changes, like smell, taste and light opened new fields of medical treatment.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Kobilka and Duke University's Robert Lefkowitz had made groundbreaking discoveries, mainly in the 1980s, on these sensors, called receptors.
The receptors serve as one of the main methods of communication within the body — conveying chemical messages from the outside world into the cell's interior.
The Academy's 2:30 a.m. call to his home startled Kobilka, a physician who is a professor and chairman of molecular and physiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
"I didn't believe it at first, but after I spoke with about five people — they handed the phone around — with really convincing Swedish accents, I started to think it was for real," said Kobilka, in a Stanford press statement.
At Wednesday morning news conference, before a throng of media and admirers, Kobilka sat stiffly between Stanford president John Hennessy and Medical School dean Dr. Phillip Pizzo — and, as if still stunned by the 2:20 a.m. phone call, spoke quietly, sparingly choosing his words carefully.
"I am not very comfortable doing this," he said. Then he credited everyone who helped.
A Yale-educated cardiologist, Kobilka went to Duke to work as a postdoctoral researcher under a large team led by co-winner and mentor Lefkowitz. It was at Duke where they build the foundation of the Nobel work -- studying how receptors work, then extracting them from tissue.
Kobilka had become fascinated by the receptors for adrenaline during his experience in a hospital intensive care unit.
He knew that a shot of epinephrine could be the difference between life and death -- opening up the swollen respiratory system and speeding up the heart rate. He sought to understand the power of epinephrine, in its smallest molecular detail. And how did the body communicate in this time of crisis? That's what he wanted to know.
At Duke, he isolated the gene for receptors for adrenaline. And he analyzed its genetic code -- discovering, astonishingly, that the receptor winds its way back and forth through the cell wall seven times. He remembered that a different receptor did the same thing, an identical number of times. This was his first 'Eureka moment': a whole family of receptors act in the same manner.
Kobilka was recruited by Stanford to join its fledgling Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology.
At Stanford, he created an image of the receptor -- thought to be an unattainable goal to many in the scientific community.
He even witnessed a receptor in the act of signaling. "That's the Eureka moment that stands out above all others," he said.
Stanford's commitment to interdisciplinary science -- and the small close-knit labs, with easy access to each other -- made success possible, he said.
"Stanford has been a remarkable place," he said. "I am not sure how I managed to land here but I did. It was probably the only place that offered me a job. You might have an idea that might be crazy -- but people here help you do it."
"At Stanford, the medical school campus and undergraduate science are all together in one small geographic area -- you can cross the street and talk to someone in physics or chemistry or engineering," he said.
When he needed to make a reagent to help purify a protein, "it was easy to just walk over and find out," he said.
He was headed toward a career in cardiology. But soon after his arrival at Duke, he had the chance to do research. "I fell in love with the process."
He kept practicing medicine, even once at Stanford, "moonlighting on weekends to pay the mortgage," he said. "I was afraid I might fail at research."
The Palo Alto resident lives with his microbiologist wife Tong Sun, and on weekends relaxes by cycling up steep Page Mill Road to Skyline Drive, as well as other rigorous routes. "If there's a road in the Bay Area, he's probably been on it," said his son Jason, a 31-year-old Mountain View resident.
He is also a runner, joining Jason and daughter Megan, 28, in the San Jose-Silicon Valley Marathon, and more recently, the San Diego marathon. He completed the 27-mile route in an impressive 3 hours, 55 minutes, said Jason.
"He's the coolest guy," said Jason. "If you didn't know what he did, you'd never guess."
Lefkowitz and Kobilka worked together in the 1980s.
Kobilka's role in the work was to isolate a gene for the receptor — no small feat at the time — to learn more about its composition. Genes provide operating instructions to the receptors, which regulate the beating of our hearts, the workings of our brains and nearly every other physiological process.
About 40 percent of medications target these receptors — so the discovery has been critical for drug research.
Kobilka credited the many people he's worked with through the years, including his wife, a physician with Kaiser.
"I'm particularly surprised to be honored, because so many people have contributed to things that I've done. It's been a collaborative effort with researchers around the world. I consider that this award recognizes their work, as well."
About half of all medications act on G-protein-coupled receptors, including beta blockers and antihistamines, so learning about them will help scientists to come up with better drugs.
The human body has about 1,000 kinds of such receptors, structures on the surface of cells, which let the body respond to a wide variety of chemical signals, like adrenaline. Some receptors are in the nose, tongue and eyes, and let us sense smells, tastes and light.
"They work as a gateway to the cell," Lefkowitz told a news conference in Stockholm by phone. "As a result they are crucial ... to regulate almost every known physiological process with humans."
Lefkowitz, 69, is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.
It is the 27th Nobel Prize to be won by a Stanford employee.
Trained in medicine, Kobilka and his work "stand at the cross roads between chemistry, structural biology and molecular medicine, and has been fostered in the setting of Stanford University that bridges these disciplines," said Stanford School of Medicine Dean Dr. Phillip Pizzo.
Lefkowitz said he was fast asleep when the Nobel committee called, but he didn't hear it because he was wearing ear plugs. So his wife picked up the phone.
"She said, 'There's a call here for you from Stockholm,'" Lefkowitz told The Associated Press. "I knew they ain't calling to find out what the weather is like in Durham today."
He said he didn't have an "inkling" that he was being considered for the Nobel Prize.
"Initially, I expected I'd have this huge burst of excitement. But I didn't. I was comfortably numb," Lefkowitz said.
Kobilka said he would put his half of the 8 million kronor ($1.2 million) award toward retirement or "pass it on to my kids."
The academy said it was long a mystery how cells interact with their environment and adapt to new situations, such as when they react to adrenaline by increasing blood pressure and making the heart beat faster.
Scientists suspected that cell surfaces had some type of receptor for hormones.
Using radioactivity, Lefkowitz managed to unveil receptors including the receptor for adrenaline, and started to understand how it works.
Kobilka and his team's capture in 2011 of an image of the receptor for adrenaline at the moment when it is activated by a hormone and sends a signal into the cell was "a molecular masterpiece," the academy said.
The award is "fantastic recognition for helping us further understand the intricate details of biochemical systems in our bodies," said Bassam Z. Shakhashiri, president of the American Chemical Society.
"They both have made great contributions to our understanding of health and disease," Shakhashiri said. "This is going to help us a great deal to develop new pharmaceuticals, new medicines for combating disease."
Mark Downs, chief executive of Britain's Society of Biology, said the critical role receptors play is now taking for granted.
"This groundbreaking work spanning genetics and biochemistry has laid the basis for much of our understanding of modern pharmacology as well as how cells in different parts of living organisms can react differently to external stimulation, such as light and smell, or the internal systems which control our bodies such as hormones," Downs said in a statement.
The U.S. has dominated the Nobel chemistry prize in recent years, with American scientists being included among the winners of 17 of the past 20 awards.
This year's Nobel announcements started Monday with the medicine prize going to stem cell pioneers John Gurdon of Britain and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka. Frenchman Serge Haroche and American David Wineland won the physics prize Tuesday for work on quantum particles.
The Nobel Prizes were established in the will of 19th-century Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. The awards are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
The Associated Press also contributed to this story.