Randy Wayne Schekman was born on December 30, 1948. He is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the editor of the Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was named the editor of eLife, a new important open-access journal. The journal was published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust. It started in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. In 2013, Schekman shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof. They were honored for their groundbreaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking.
Early life and education
Schekman was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Alfred Schekman, an electrical engineer and computer software designer, and Esther (Bader) Schekman. His family were Jewish emigrants from Russia and Bessarabia. In the late 1950s, his family moved to the new suburban community of Rossmoor, located in Orange County near Long Beach.
He graduated from Western High School in Anaheim, California, in 1966. He earned a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1971. During his third year of college, he studied abroad at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland as an exchange student. He received a PhD from Stanford University in 1975 for research on DNA replication, working with scientist Arthur Kornberg. After joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, he was promoted to associate professor in 1981 and to professor in 1984.
Research and career
Since 1991, Schekman has worked as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in the Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, at the University of California, Berkeley. His laboratory at that university studies how cells build membranes and move materials between different parts of the cell, including yeast. Before this, he was a teacher and researcher in the now-closed Department of Biochemistry at the same university.
In 1987, Schekman received the Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology. In 1992, he became a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2002, he shared the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University with James Rothman for discovering how cells use membrane trafficking to organize their activities and communicate with their environment. In 2008, he was named the first Miller Senior Fellow at the Miller Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. That same year, he joined the American Philosophical Society. In 2010, he received the Massry Prize from the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. Schekman is a member of the Selection Committee and later chair of Life Science and Medicine, which chooses winners of the Shaw Prize.
In 2013, Schekman was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He, along with Thomas C. Südhof and James Rothman, was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the machinery that controls vesicle traffic, a key system in cells. Schekman gave his share of the prize money, $400,000, to create an endowment for the Esther and Wendy Schekman Chair in Basic Cancer Biology at UC Berkeley. The chair is named after his mother and sister, who both died of cancer.
In 2017, Schekman received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement. In 2021, he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, a country he has worked with since 2019. In 2023, he was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by Nicolae Testemitanu State University of Medicine and Pharmacy in the Republic of Moldova.
Open-access science
In December 2013, Schekman asked for changes in how academic journals publish research and promoted open access science. He announced that his lab at the University of California, Berkeley would stop sending papers to the well-known closed-access journals Nature, Cell, and Science. He said these journals harm science by limiting the number of papers they accept to increase demand. Schekman also criticized them for choosing papers that are likely to be cited often, which boosts the journals’ reputation, instead of papers that show important scientific results. He explained that the high status of these journals sometimes leads scientists to take shortcuts or follow popular trends instead of studying important questions. Schekman was a former editor of eLife, an open access journal that competes with Nature, Cell, and Science. eLife accepts papers after they are reviewed by working scientists, and all accepted papers are free to read.
Parkinson's disease
In 2017, Schekman's wife, Nancy Walls, passed away after fighting Parkinson's disease for 20 years. During this time, Schekman was asked to lead a new scientific project called ASAP. This project aimed to create a global program where scientists work together to study the causes and development of Parkinson's disease. With help from The Michael J. Fox Foundation and support from charitable organizations, ASAP expanded by 2022 to include 35 research teams in 165 laboratories worldwide. The goal of ASAP is to combine the skills of many scientists to make new discoveries that could lead to better treatments for Parkinson's disease.