“California’s master plan for higher education included the construction of new campuses large enough for the children of all the families of our state to enjoy the nation’s finest educational opportunities. I was a direct beneficiary of that investment.”
Randy Schekman, 2013 Nobel laureate for physiology or medicine, professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley
Randy Schekman’s lifelong fascination with biology began the minute he squinted into a toy microscope at his family’s kitchen table in Southern California and saw “the amazing microbial world of single cell organisms crawling and swimming around my vision,” he said. He wanted to zoom in further, but his parents didn’t have enough money to buy him a better microscope. So he saved up money from mowing his neighbor’s lawn to buy his own from a local pawn shop.
That fascination carried him off to college at UCLA in the 1960s, a time when California was massively expanding its public higher education system. “I was from a middle-class family where college was an expectation, but money was a concern,” Schekman said. “No private school for me, but UCLA was great.” As a first year, he did research in the lab of Willard Libby, the 1960 Nobel laureate in chemistry. And for $6.25, he bought season tickets to watch Kareem Abdul Jabbar carry the Bruins to three straight NCAA titles.
As a young professor at UC Berkeley, Schekman set out to study how proteins get from the cells where they’re made to the places they’re needed in our bodies. Studying a single-cell organism, baker’s yeast, he discovered the genes and molecules that control how cells package and transport proteins through the cell wall. The same genes and proteins his lab discovered in yeast have been found to operate throughout our body to organize the secretion of hormones, antibodies, neurotransmitters, and all the things the human body uses for normal physiology.
After his initial discovery, Schekman helped a biotechnology company engineer yeast to manufacture and secrete large quantities of useful proteins, such as human insulin to manage diabetes and the hepatitis B vaccine. Today a third of the world’s supply of recombinant insulin comes from yeast.
UC’s Nobel legacy
The University of California has been winning Nobel Prizes since 1939, when Ernest O. Lawrence was awarded the prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron. Meet UC’s 74 Nobelists.
The 2025 Nobel laureates are giving talks about their work as part of this week’s awards celebrations in Stockholm. Watch UC faculty and alumni describe their discoveries in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry.
