Eric Manvers Shooter
neuroscientist (1924-2018)
Eric Manvers Shooter (born 18 April 1924 in Nottinghamshire, England; died 21 March 2018) was an English scientist known for investigating the biochemistry of nerve growth factor (NGF). From 1961 onwards he was affiliated with Stanford University School of Medicine, where he was founding chairman of the Department of Neurobiology (1975–1987).
Biography
Shooter attended the University of Cambridge, earning bachelor's (1945) and doctoral (1949) degrees in chemistry. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, and having made some notable discoveries about the genetics of haemoglobin while a lecturer at University College London, he moved to the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford as a research fellow in 1961. He was subsequently appointed associate professor of genetics (1963) and professor of biochemistry (1968), and chaired the school's doctoral program in neurosciences from 1972 until 1982. He chaired the Department of Neurobiology from its inception in 1975 until 1987. In 1988 he co-founded the New York-based biotechnology company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. His research group continued to be productive until his retirement in 2004.
Research
Shooter was acknowledged for his work on neurotrophins — proteins that induce the differentiation and survival of nerve cells. At the suggestion of Joshua Lederberg he spent three years intensively studying the structure and mechanisms of the canonical neurotrophin NGF. He also characterized the PMP22 gene in mice, defects in which cause the myelin sheath that protects nerve cells to break down in a way that resembles human neurological diseases called demyelinating peripheral neuropathies.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eric Manvers Shooter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.