John Hughes (neuroscientist) facts for kids

John Hughes (born 6 January 1942) is a British neuroscientist who shared the 1978 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for the discovery of met-enkephalin and leu-enkephalin.

Education

Hughes was born and grew up in South London. He received BSc and PhD degrees from King's College London.

Career and research

After his PhD, Hughes did postdoctoral research at Yale Medical School, where he studied the effects of angiotensin on the heart. He took a position as lecturer in Pharmacology at Aberdeen University, where he had a laboratory in Marischal College, and also collaborated in research with Hans Kosterlitz. He went on to become Reader in Pharmacological Biochemistry, and subsequently Professor, at Imperial College London. Later, he became Director of the Parke-Davis Neuroscience Centre at the University of Cambridge, where he is now an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Discovery of enkephalins

While working with Kosterlitz at Aberdeen, Hughes helped discover the enkephalin peptides.

He would bicycle daily to a slaughterhouse, where he would trade bottles of whiskey to the butchers in exchange for pig heads, and he subsequently prepared brain extracts using acetone. After testing many samples in Kosterlitz's assays, the two scientists were able to isolate and identify two peptides, met- and leu-enkephalin. Hughes and Kosterlitz first announced their findings at a scientific conference in May 1974, and published the structures of the two enkephalins in 1975. In 1978, they shared the Lasker award with Solomon H. Snyder.