Alfred Gilman, Sr.

Who was Alfred Gilman, Sr.?

Alfred Gilman was an American pharmacologist at Yale University, School of Medicine. Later, he was at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. In 1941, with his colleague Louis S. Goodman, he published the first edition of the classic textbook The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, now often informally cited as "Goodman and Gilman". He was a member of U.S. National Academy of Science.

His father owned a music store in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he could play almost any musical instrument and frequently did so at neighborhood parties. Unlike his father, however, Alfred Gilman turned to science, receiving his Ph.D. in Physiological Chemistry from Yale in 1931 for "Chemical and Physiological Investigations on Canine Gastric Secretion". He then joined the faculty of the Department of Pharmacology at the Yale Medical School, where he and Louis S. Goodman, a young M.D., became colleagues and close friends. He is father of Alfred G. Gilman, Nobel winning pharmacologist.

The textbook has been used throughout the world since first publication.