persuaded him by explaining that pharmacology was "just biochemistry with a purpose." However, Sutherland was departing for Vanderbilt University, so Gilman studied with Sutherland's collaborator, Theodore Rall. Gilman graduated from Case Western in 1969, then did his post-doctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health with Nobel laureate Marshall Nirenberg from 1969 to 1971. Nirenberg assigned him to work on the study of nerve endings (axons from cultured neuroblastoma cells), which he considered as "a truly boring project." Instead, against the advice of Nirenberg, he worked on a new method for studying protein binding. After six weeks of working, he showed his result to Nirenberg, who immediately communicated it and got it published in 1970. The work was a simple and vital biochemical assay for studying cyclic AMP. Career In 1971, Gilman was appointed assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Virginia, School of Medicine, in Charlottesville, Virginia. He became full professor in 1977. In 1981, he became chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. From 2004 he became the dean, and between 2006 and 2009 he was Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost. He retired from university in 2009 to hold the office the chief scientific officer of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. He, however, resigned after three years as he felt that the administration was under commercial and political pressures. His resignation was followed by seven senior scientists. In addition to mainstream academic position he held other key positions. He was one of the founders of Regeneron, a biotechnology company headquartered in Tarrytown, New York. He was also the founder and Chair of the Alliance for Cellular Signaling, a global collaboration for the study of cell signalling. He became its director from 1990. In 2005, he was appointed director of the drug company, Eli Lilly & Co. Death Gilman died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer in Dallas, Texas on December 23, 2015 at the age of 74. He was survived by his wife and three children, Amy Ariagno and Anne Sincovec, both of Dallas, and Edward Gilman of Austin. Contributions Discovery of G protein In the 1960s, Earl Sutherland and Theodore Rall discovered that cyclic AMP (the second messenger in signal transduction) was a responsible for activating enzymes in the cell, and that cyclic AMP is produced only when hormones (the