Joseph L. Goldstein, M.D.
Joseph Goldstein serves as chairman for the Board of Scientific Counselors, and is chairman of the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. In 1985, he was named Regental Professor of the University of Texas. He also holds the Paul J. Thomas Chair in Medicine and the Julie and Louis A. Beecherl Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science.
Goldstein and his colleague, Michael S. Brown, discovered the low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor and worked out how these receptors control cholesterol homeostasis. At the basic level, this work opened the field of receptor-mediated endocytosis, and at the clinical level it helped lay the conceptual groundwork for development of drugs called statins that lower blood LDL cholesterol and prevent heart attacks. Goldstein and Brown shared many awards for this work, including the Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and the National Medal of Science.
In recent work, Goldstein and Brown discovered the SREBP family of transcription factors and showed how these membrane-bound molecules control the synthesis of cholesterol and fatty acids through a newly described process of regulated Intramembrane proteolysis. For this work, Goldstein and Brown received the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research.
Goldstein is chairman of the Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards Jury, a member of the boards of trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and The Rockefeller University, and is a director of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He also serves on the scientific advisory boards of the Welch Foundation, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Genentech, Inc. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) and a foreign member of the Royal Society (U.K.).
He received his undergraduate degree from Washington and Lee University and his medical degree from UT Southwestern Medical Center.