As a postdoc in London in the 1950s, Paul Greengard developed a way to measure intermediary metabolites in nerve cells (Nature 178, 632–634; 1956). Greengard, now at Rockefeller University in New York, later abandoned this technique. But he remained interested in how neurons communicate with each other, how this goes awry in disease and how drugs that treat these disorders work.

The role of dopamine, a chemical neurotransmitter, in Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and drug addiction was a common thread in Greengard's research. He received a Nobel prize in 2000 for work on the mechanisms of slow synaptic communication between nerve cells.

At the time I began my career in neuroscience, it was widely accepted that nerve cells communicate through electrical signals,” Greengard says. Now, neurotransmitters are believed to be the main means of cross-talk between neurons — via fast synaptic transmission by ion channels and slow synaptic transmission through complex signalling cascades.

Fifty years after his first Nature paper, Greengard's work goes on. On page 814 he reports the effect of a protein that regulates actin polymers on the shape of dendritic spines — minuscule protrusions on nerve cells that detect incoming information.