in his mouth, "or perhaps a pestle (but not the mortar)." His parents were Mabel (Schmidt) and Alfred Gilman, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and one of the authors of the classic pharmacology textbook Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (nicknamed the "Blue Bible" of pharmacology). His middle name was in honor of the co-author Louis S. Goodman. The book was published in 1941, the year he was born. His friend Michael Stuart Brown (who was also born in 1941, and later the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate) joked that Gilman was "probably the only person who was ever named after a textboook." (Gilman later served as one of the textbook's editors from 1980 to 2000, first collaborating with, then succeeding his father and Goodman.) He had an elder sister Joanna Gilman. He grew up in White Plains, New York, while his father worked at Columbia University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Education Gilman attended local elementary school in White Plains. Hoping for better education, in 1955 his parents sent him to The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, where he completed grades 10 to 12. The school was known for its sports activity, and he described it as "a strict, monastic, and frankly unpleasant environment in the 1950s: academic boot camp." He recalled that he was "the worst 120-pound lineman on the intramural tackle football team." He studied science at Yale University. His first research project was to test the adaptor hypothesis of Francis Crick. He worked in the laboratory of Melvin Simpson, where he met his future wife Kathryn Hedlund. (They were married in 1963.) He graduated in 1962 receiving a BA in biology with major in biochemistry. During summer break in 1962, he briefly worked at Burroughs Wellcome & Company in New York, under with Allan Conney. With Conney he published his first two research papers in 1963. He then entered a combined MD-PhD program at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio where he wanted to study under Nobel laureate pharmacologist Earl Sutherland, who was a close friend of his father. It was Sutherland who had introduced the combined MD-PhD course, and invited Gilman to join course. But to Gilman, a seven-year program was like "an eternity in purgatory" and that he preferred not to have a degree in pharmacology, so he refused. Sutherland later