The
1994 Nobel Prise for Medicine and Physiology went to Alfred Gilman (right) and Martin
Rodbell (far right).
Rodbell discovered that transducer molecules provide links between hormone receptors and the effector molecules they regulate (e.g. adenylyl cyclase).
He also showed that the transducers were GTPases and thus he called them "nucleotide regulatory proteins", later to be renamed G proteins.
Gilman used biochemical methods and cDNA recombinant technology to isolate and sequence the G proteins.