Letter to Editor December 02, 2024 December 02, 2024

Leptin 30 years – A chat with Jeffrey M. Friedman

DOI: 10.20945/2359-4292-2024-0413

THE ROAD TO THE DISCOVERY

Jeff earned his MD from Albany Medical College in 1977 and underwent a residency program at the same institution from 1977 to 1980. He told us that while he was considering his next steps in medical education, he went for a research training period at the laboratory of Mary Jeanne Kreek at the Rockefeller University, and this was the turning point for his career, as during that period he found his vocation. During that one year at Kreek’s lab, Jeff had his first contact with the obese (ob) mice while working with Bruce Schneider. Bruce was interested in the role of cholecystokinin (Cck) in controlling appetite and believed that the massive obesity of ob mouse was related to a defect in Cck expression. The evidence Bruce had at that time came from studies carried out by the Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Rosalyn Yalow, proposing that low levels of brain Cck could have a causal relation with the obese phenotype of ob mice (). However, later on, it was noted that Cck levels in brain were not different in ob mice as compared to control mice. Jeff kept this information in mind to be explored as a side project during his PhD.

In 1981, Jeff started the PhD Program at the Rockefeller University and joined the Jim Darnell’s lab to study the transcriptional regulation of genes in the liver. He published several important papers in that field (–), which, at the first sight, could suggest it had no impact on the discovery of leptin. However, some of the methods Jeff learned at that time, were fundamental in the process of cloning the ob gene.

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