Randy Schekman ’71

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Image courtesy of © Nobel Media AB 2013, photo by Alexander Mahmoud.

Randy Schekman ’71 was the proud recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He shared the award with James E. Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof. Schekman and his fellow laureates were recognized for their discovery of how the cell organizes its transport system. This system, called vesicle transport, is crucial to many human physiological processes. According to the Nobel Organization, “Defective vesicle transport occurs in a variety of diseases including a number of neurological and immunological disorders, as well as in diabetes.” Schekman’s main contribution to the discovery was achieved by experimenting with yeast as a model system.

Aside from the Nobel Prize, Schekman has also been awarded the 2002 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the Eli Lilly Research Award in Microbiology and Immunology and the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award in Basic Biomedical Science.

It was at UCLA where Schekman found his true calling. Though originally pre-med, he changed his major after taking a class with Nobel Prize winner and carbon-14 dating inventor, Willard Libby. Libby assigned Schekman to the lab of Michael Conrad where he was told to read Molecular Biology of the Gene by James Watson. "I remember reading it in my leisure time like it was the Bible," Schekman told UCLA Newsroom. As a student at UCLA, he spent the majority of his time in research laboratories. Schekman describes his experience inside the laboratory, “I was there day and night ... This was pushing the envelope, beyond what was in textbooks. That was really exciting to me.”

As an advocate for public education in California, Schekman donated his Nobel Prize money entirely to the University of California to create the Esther and Wendy Schekman Chair in Basic Cancer Biology at UC Berkeley. When asked about his decision by UCLA Newsroom, he had this to say, “I decided that the money was more useful for the university than it was for me ... I think we need to understand more about basic biology. There's still a lot to be learned. Breakthroughs have come from an understanding of how normal cells grow and divide and what goes wrong in cancer cells. I think ultimately the therapies for all the different forms of cancer will come from basic science rather than by just throwing the kitchen sink at a tumor cell.”

Schekman graduated from UCLA in 1971 with a bachelor’s in molecular biology. He then continued his education at Stanford University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1974. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and a professor in the department of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley where he has been on the faculty since 1976. Schekman is the seventh UCLA alumnus to win the Nobel Prize.

Read the Nobel Organization’s official press release on Schekman’s achievement and watch a video interview with him.