Gerald Edelman is the director of the Neurosciences Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is also the founding president of the James B. Duke Professor, Chair, and Chief Scientific Officer of the Institute for Information Research at Duke University. He received his PhD in 1975 from Harvard Medical School, where he studied immunology
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His research on neural mechanisms underlying intercellular communication led to his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988. His other major contributions include elucidating thiamine-responsive synapses in vertebrate central neurons, identifying the role of glial cell-derived neurotrophic factors for neuronal survival, and discovering that Alzheimer's disease is caused by brain lesions that trigger an abnormal response to amyloid plaques. He has authored over 1,000 peer-reviewed articles and four books.