Ferid Murad

Ferid Murad: The Chemist Behind the Blood Vessel's Secret

A drug doctors had prescribed for chest pain since the nineteenth century turned out to work by an entirely unknown mechanism, and it took Ferid Murad's laboratory work to find it: nitroglycerin, it emerged, was quietly releasing a simple gas — nitric oxide — that relaxed blood vessels from the inside. That single discovery, made decades before its full significance was understood, eventually reshaped cardiovascular medicine, helped save premature infants struggling to breathe, and led, indirectly, to Viagra. In 1998 it won Murad a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The Restaurant Owner's Son

Ferid Murad was born on September 14, 1936, in Whiting, Indiana, the son of Xhabir Murat Ejupi, an Albanian immigrant from Gostivar who anglicized his name to John Murad after arriving at Ellis Island in 1913, and Henrietta Josephine Bowman, from a Baptist family in Alton, Illinois. The couple ran a small restaurant in Indiana, where Ferid worked as a boy alongside his two brothers. Raised Catholic, he later became Episcopalian during college. That working-class, immigrant household produced a scholarship student: Murad earned a Rector Scholarship to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and completed an undergraduate chemistry degree, on the pre-med track, in 1958.

An Unusual Dual Degree

Murad then enrolled at Case Western Reserve University in one of the first explicit combined MD-PhD programs in the country, pairing a medical degree with a doctorate in pharmacology — a structure designed to produce physician-scientists equally comfortable at a patient's bedside and a laboratory bench. He completed both degrees in 1965, among the earliest graduates of that model, then interned at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1965 to 1966 and spent several years at the National Heart and Lung Institute from 1967 to 1970. In 1970 he joined the University of Virginia's medical school, where he held joint appointments in medicine and pharmacology and rose to full professor by 1975, remaining there until 1981.

Tracing Nitroglycerin's Secret

It was at Virginia that Murad carried out the research that would define his career. Nitroglycerin had been used to treat angina since the 1870s, but no one understood precisely how it worked inside the body. Murad's laboratory demonstrated that the compound relaxes smooth muscle — the tissue lining blood vessels — by releasing nitric oxide, which in turn activates an enzyme that raises levels of a signaling molecule called cyclic GMP, causing vessels to widen and blood flow to improve. The finding was, at the time, biologically strange: nitric oxide is a simple, unstable gas, not the kind of molecule biologists expected cells to use as a deliberate signal. Two other researchers, Robert Furchgott and Louis Ignarro, independently extended the discovery, showing that the body's own cells manufacture nitric oxide to regulate blood vessel tone — together the three scientists established nitric oxide as an entirely new class of biological signaling molecule.

Nobel Recognition and Wider Applications

The Nobel Assembly awarded Murad, Furchgott, and Ignarro the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning nitric oxide as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system." The practical consequences of the underlying science extended well beyond the original angina research: nitric oxide pathways proved central to treatments for premature infants with respiratory distress and to the development of erectile dysfunction drugs including Viagra, which works by amplifying the same cyclic GMP signaling Murad had first traced back to nitroglycerin. The University of Virginia's School of Medicine, reflecting on his death, called him "an extraordinary physician, scientist, pharmacologist and educator whose contributions to the field of cardiovascular medicine have left indelible impact on patients in Virginia and beyond."

A Career Across Academia and Industry

After Virginia, Murad continued his research at Stanford University from 1981 to 1988, then moved into industry as a vice president at Abbott Laboratories from 1988 to 1993, where he helped translate his own basic research into drug development. He returned to academic medicine at the University of Texas's McGovern Medical School from 1997 to 2011, later held a position at George Washington University from 2011 to 2017, and finished his career affiliated with the Palo Alto VA Medical Center from 2017 until shortly before his death. Along the way he also founded a biotechnology company, Molecular Geriatrics, applying nitric oxide research toward age-related disease. His many honors beyond the Nobel included the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1996, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, the American Heart Association's Ciba Award, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences. He married Carol Leopold, and the couple had five children.

Why Ferid Is Called a Genius

Murad's case for genius rests on a specific, well-documented kind of scientific insight: the ability to look at a drug that had been used for over a century without anyone asking how it actually worked, and to design the experiments that answered the question. That is not the popular image of genius as sudden inspiration; it was patient, mechanistic biochemistry — tracing a chain of cause and effect from a familiar molecule down to a gas nobody expected cells to use as a signal. The Nobel committee's own language credited him and his co-laureates with identifying "an entirely new principle for signaling," a description scientists reserve for genuinely foundational discoveries rather than incremental improvements. The honest caveat is that Murad did not work alone or in isolation: the full picture required Furchgott's and Ignarro's independent contributions, and Murad's own Nobel lecture and later writing emphasized the discovery as a collective unfolding of a mystery across multiple laboratories rather than a solitary breakthrough. His genius, if the word fits, was in identifying the right unanswered question and doggedly running it to ground.

Legacy

Murad's discovery of nitric oxide's role in the body is now considered one of the foundational insights of modern cardiovascular pharmacology, cited in the treatment of everything from heart disease to newborn respiratory failure to sexual dysfunction, and it opened an entire field of research into gas-based cellular signaling that continues today. He died on September 4, 2023, in Menlo Park, California, at 86, remembered across the institutions where he taught — DePauw, Case Western, Virginia, Stanford, Texas, and George Washington — as both a rigorous scientist and, in the University of Virginia's words, an educator whose influence outlasted any single laboratory finding.

Achievements

• Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research — 1996
• Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — 1998
• Affiliated with University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University and University of Virginia
• Educated at DePauw University, University of Virginia and Case Western Reserve University
• Worked as physician, biologist and pharmacologist