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Portrait of Randy W. Schekman
Photo: Bengt Oberger, Own work · CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine · 2013

Randy W. Schekman

Using baker's yeast, he found the genes cells use to ship proteins out, work that later helped companies use yeast to make insulin.

The Nobel citation: “for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells”
Born
December 30, 1948, St. Paul, MN, USA
Shared with
James E. Rothman, Thomas C. Südhof
Affiliation at the time
University of California, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA

Medicine prize

2013

Shared with 2 other laureates.

Age that year

65years

Born in 1948.

Headline credited impact

$7.5–10billion in economic value

Cumulative global sales of genetically engineered non-antibody protein medicines (a proxy for economic activity). How it was built

Sources cited

23

Fact-checked September 24, 2026.

  • As a boy he bought a microscope at a pawnshop after complaining to police that his mother kept borrowing his savings. It later went on display at the Nobel Museum.
  • He failed German twice at UCLA and could not graduate until a sympathetic dean waived the requirement.
  • When he chose to study cell transport in baker's yeast in 1976, some thought it a foolish decision.
  • He gave his Nobel Prize money to endow a cancer research chair at Berkeley named for his mother and sister, who both died of cancer.
  • The day before collecting his Nobel, he announced that his lab would avoid the journals Nature, Cell and Science.

The breakthrough

Finding the genes that run the cell's shipping system, using yeast

Cells are always sending proteins outward: hormones, enzymes and chemical signals. About a tenth of the proteins a cell makes are exported, Schekman has said. They travel in tiny membrane bubbles called vesicles, from the endoplasmic reticulum, where proteins are made, to the Golgi, where they are finished and sorted, and on to the cell surface. In 1976, newly arrived at Berkeley, Schekman set out to find the genes that run this system. He chose baker's yeast, which also exports proteins and is easy to study genetically. His team hunted for yeast mutants that stopped exporting proteins when they were warmed a little. At the higher temperature these cells filled up with undelivered cargo, much as passengers pile up at a station when the trains stop running. By 1980 the search had turned up 23 genes, which he called sec genes. Where the cargo piled up showed what each gene did: some were needed to leave the endoplasmic reticulum, some to pass through the Golgi, and one to reach the cell surface. His lab then rebuilt steps of the process in a test tube, and in 1994 described COPII, a coat made of Sec proteins that helps pinch vesicles off the endoplasmic reticulum. One of his yeast genes, sec18, turned out to make the same protein as NSF, which James Rothman had found in mammals. Yeast and human cells share this very old machinery.[3],[4],[5],[6],[7],[19]

“I have now committed my lab to avoiding luxury journals, and I encourage others to do likewise.”
Randy W. Schekman, From his opinion article in The Guardian, published on 9 December 2013, the day before he received the Nobel Prize.[12]

What it meant for humanity

Schekman's discoveries are basic science, but one industrial use stands out. Yeast can be engineered to make human proteins and export them into the liquid they grow in, where the product is easy to collect. Berkeley's press office has said that his findings helped the biotechnology industry use this route in the 1980s and 1990s to make medicines and industrial enzymes, and that he consulted for 20 years for Chiron Corp., which developed yeast systems for insulin and hepatitis B vaccine. The clearest example is insulin. In 1986 a team led by Lars Thim steered insulin precursors out of yeast by attaching them to the leader sequence of alpha-factor, a yeast mating signal. Two years earlier, Schekman, David Julius and Jeremy Thorner had used sec mutants to trace how yeast process alpha-factor on its way out of the cell. Novo Nordisk scientists wrote in 2024 that the world needs more than 40 tons of pharmaceutical insulin a year, and that half of it is made by yeast that secrete it. Many people built that industry, and his is one contribution among several. His work also helps explain disease. The Nobel committee notes that faults in the cell's transport machinery play a part in neurological disorders, diabetes and immune disorders. In 2006, a team that included Schekman showed that a rare inherited disorder of the skull, eyes and skeleton, cranio-lenticulo-sutural dysplasia, is caused by a mutation in SEC23A, a human part of the COPII coat his lab had discovered in yeast. Beyond the lab, he has pushed for open access to research as editor of the journal eLife and has led a large research program on Parkinson's disease, the illness his wife lived with for about 20 years.

  • Novo Nordisk scientists report that the world needs more than 40 tons of pharmaceutical insulin a year, and that half of it is made by yeast that secrete it through the export pathway Schekman helped map.[4],[18]
  • In 1984 he, David Julius and Jeremy Thorner used sec mutants to trace how yeast process the mating signal alpha-factor. Its leader sequence later carried insulin precursors out of yeast in a 1986 method by Lars Thim and colleagues.[16],[17]
  • Berkeley says yeast systems for making insulin and hepatitis B vaccine were developed at Chiron Corp. during the 20 years Schekman consulted for the company.[6],[7]
  • In 2006 a team including Schekman showed that a mutation in SEC23A, a protein of the COPII vesicle coat, causes cranio-lenticulo-sutural dysplasia, a rare inherited disorder of the skull, eyes and skeleton.[20]
  • He donated his Nobel Prize money to create the Esther and Wendy Schekman Chair in basic cancer research at UC Berkeley, in honor of his mother and sister.[2]

Impact in numbers

Schekman's main gift is understanding. His yeast genetics turned the study of protein export from describing what cells look like into identifying the genes and proteins that do the work, and showed that the same machinery runs in yeast and in humans. That knowledge has helped explain rare inherited diseases caused by faulty transport, and it underpins today's research on how nerve cells release signals and how the pancreas releases insulin. It also had a practical side: yeast that secrete human proteins now make about half the world's insulin, an industry built by many scientists and engineers, and his work is one part of its foundation. We make a single, small economic claim on that basis. He has also shaped how science is shared, as editor of PNAS and eLife and as a vocal critic of judging research by the journal it appears in, and he has led a large collaborative research program on Parkinson's disease.

HealthFundamental scienceEconomy

Each number is the laureate’s credited share of a real-world outcome, cumulative to 2025. The whole outcome, the share of credit, and the reasoning are shown so you can check the arithmetic. Outcomes shared with other laureates are counted once on the impact page.

  • Low confidenceRippleModeledEconomy

    Cumulative global sales of genetically engineered non-antibody protein medicines (a proxy for economic activity)

    $7.5–10

    billion in economic value, credited share

    That is 0.5% of $1.5–2 trillion in economic value since 1982.

    How this number was built

    Same outcome and range as the Berg, Kornberg and Nathans profiles: world sales of recombinant non-antibody protein medicines since 1982. 2013 antibody sales (~$75B) were about half of biopharma (Ecker 2015); 2021 originator proteins sold $271B, of which ~$217B antibodies, leaving ~$54B (Walsh 2022). Ramp arithmetic gives ~$1.5T low, ~$2.0T high. Sales, not net benefit. Share 0.005 (~$7.5-10B): half of the 40+ tons of insulin made yearly is secreted by yeast (Kjeldsen 2024), and his sec-mutant work traced how yeast export alpha-factor (Julius 1984), whose leader Thim's team used to secrete insulin (1986). But the engineering was done by others, and yeast (S. cerevisiae and Pichia) made only 9 of 159 recombinant products approved in 2018-2022 (Walsh 2022), though these include big sellers such as insulin and semaglutide. Rothman takes no share.[6],[16],[17],[18],[21],[22]

    Sources: mAbs (via PubMed Central); Nature Biotechnology (via PubMed Central); Trends in Biotechnology (via PubMed); Cell (via PubMed); Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via PubMed); Berkeley News, University of California, Berkeley

The double edge

We found no documented harms from Schekman's discoveries. Two caveats are worth knowing. First, his university's press releases credit his research with enabling yeast-based drug production, and their figures shift over time: in 2002 Berkeley said a quarter of the world's insulin came from yeast, and in 2013 a third. The industrial methods also depended on work by others, such as the scientists who used a yeast mating-signal sequence to carry insulin out of the cell. Second, his 2013 call to boycott Nature, Cell and Science drew criticism. Open-access publisher Michael Eisen praised the stand but agreed with critics that it was an easy step for someone who had already made it. In the article he acknowledged that his own prize-winning papers had appeared in such journals and that he was editing a rival journal, eLife. Retraction Watch also questioned the retraction record of PNAS, which he had edited, while noting that its retraction rate was lower than those three journals'.

  • Minor

    Claims about industrial impact come mostly from his university

    Berkeley's press releases say his discoveries led to the success of yeast-based biotechnology, but the figures vary: a quarter of the world's insulin made by yeast in 2002, a third in 2013. Novo Nordisk scientists now put it at half. Industrial methods rested on many contributions, including the use of the yeast alpha-factor leader to export insulin (Thim and colleagues, 1986).[6],[7],[17],[18]

  • Minor

    His boycott of top journals was called easy for an established scientist

    In 2013 he urged scientists to avoid Nature, Cell and Science. PLOS co-founder Michael Eisen backed the aim but agreed with critics that the boycott was easy for someone who had already made it. He was editing the rival journal eLife. Retraction Watch noted that PNAS, which he edited from 2006, retracted 23 papers in 2006-2011, against 28 for Cell, Nature and Science combined, though PNAS published far more papers and had a lower retraction rate.[12],[13],[14],[15]

Against the odds

Schekman did not face persecution, and his career was not blocked by antisemitism. His family's history, though, was shaped by it. His mother's parents left a village in Bessarabia in 1927. Most of their relatives who stayed were killed when the Nazis and their allies took the region; Romanian and German forces massacred Jews there in 1941. He was born in 1948 in St. Paul and grew up in Minneapolis, which a journalist had called the capital of antisemitism in the United States just two years earlier. Jews there faced discrimination in jobs, housing and public places, and the city's North Side, where his family lived, was its largest Jewish neighborhood. He writes that his family lived only among Jewish families, and he did not know about antisemitism until an older boy punched him in the stomach on learning he was headed to the Jewish Community Center. Money was tight. During the Depression his mother spent time in an orphanage while her mother was treated for tuberculosis. He chose a public university because it was what his family could afford, and at Stanford he felt out of place among classmates from elite private schools. His sister's death from leukemia while he was at UCLA hit him hard, and his grades fell.

  • 1941

    Family killed

    Most relatives of his maternal grandparents, who had stayed in Bessarabia, were killed when the Nazis took over Eastern Europe. Romanian and German forces massacred Jews in Bessarabia in 1941 and deported survivors to Transnistria.[2],[11]

  • 1946

    Discrimination

    In 1946, two years before he was born, a journalist called Minneapolis the capital of antisemitism in the United States, because of discrimination against Jews in jobs, housing and public places. Mayor Hubert Humphrey then pressed for anti-discrimination laws.[10]

  • —

    Antisemitic attack

    As a young boy in Minneapolis, he was punched in the stomach by an older boy who learned he was on his way to the Jewish Community Center. He says it was his first encounter with antisemitism.[2]

  • —

    Poverty

    During the Depression his mother and aunt lived in an orphanage while their mother was treated for tuberculosis. Years later he went to a public university because it was the best his family could afford.[2]

Jewish background

Both parents JewishCulturally Jewish

Both sides of Schekman's family were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In his Nobel autobiography he writes that his father's father came to America amid a wave of Jewish migration and settled in the Twin Cities Jewish community. His mother grew up in Minneapolis's Jewish immigrant neighborhood; her parents came from a village in Bessarabia, and most of their relatives were killed when the Nazis took over Eastern Europe. He was given the Hebrew name Ruvain, attended Hebrew school, and spent Friday evenings at Sabbath dinners with his grandparents. As an adult he wrote that he is not a religious person. The Jewish Virtual Library describes him as a Jewish American laureate.[2],[8]

Key dates

  1. December 30, 1948

    Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Alfred and Esther Schekman, children of Jewish immigrants. He grows up in north Minneapolis.[1],[2]

  2. 1959

    The family moves to Southern California, where a toy microscope and school science fairs spark his interest in microbes.[2]

  3. 1966

    Enters UCLA, where a research project on DNA turns him from medicine toward a life in experimental science.[2]

  4. 1973

    Marries Nancy Walls, a nurse, while a graduate student in Arthur Kornberg's biochemistry department at Stanford.[2]

  5. 1974

    Earns his PhD at Stanford under Arthur Kornberg, a 1959 Nobel laureate.[3]

  6. 1976

    Joins the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, and begins using yeast to study how cells export proteins.[3],[7]

  7. 1979

    With Peter Novick, reports a temperature-sensitive yeast mutant in which secretion and growth of the cell surface are blocked.[4]

  8. 1980

    His lab identifies 23 genes needed for protein export in yeast and sorts them by where transport gets stuck.[4]

  9. 1994

    His lab describes COPII, a coat made of Sec proteins that drives vesicles to bud from the endoplasmic reticulum.[19]

  10. 2002

    Shares the Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with James Rothman.[7]

  11. 2006

    Becomes editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).[15]

  12. 2011

    Leaves PNAS to become editor-in-chief of eLife, a new open-access journal.[15]

  13. October 7, 2013

    Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas Südhof for discoveries about vesicle traffic in cells.[1],[3]

  14. 2017

    His wife, Nancy Walls, dies after about 20 years with Parkinson's disease. Around this time he becomes scientific director of ASAP, a Parkinson's research program.[9],[23]

Sources

  1. 1.Randy W. Schekman - Facts · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach)
  2. 2.Randy W. Schekman - Biographical (from The Nobel Prizes 2013) · NobelPrize.org, 2014
  3. 3.Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013 · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet), 2013
  4. 4.Scientific Background: Machinery Regulating Vesicle Traffic, A Major Transport System in our Cells (Juleen R. Zierath and Urban Lendahl) · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine), 2013
  5. 5.Randy W. Schekman - Nobel Lecture: Genetic and Biochemical Dissection of the Secretory Pathway · NobelPrize.org, 2013
  6. 6.Randy Schekman awarded 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine · Berkeley News, University of California, Berkeley, 2013
  7. 7.Randy Schekman shares 2002 Lasker Award for basic medical research · UC Berkeley Media Relations (news archive), 2002
  8. 8.Randy Schekman · Jewish Virtual Library (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)
  9. 9.Randy Schekman · Wikipedia
  10. 10.From Exclusion to Integration: The Story of Jews in Minnesota (Laura Weber) · MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society
  11. 11.Romania (Holocaust Encyclopedia) · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
  12. 12.How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science (Randy Schekman) · The Guardian, 2013
  13. 13.Schekman's 'luxury journal' boycott doesn't go far enough (Michael Eisen) · The Conversation, 2013
  14. 14.Cell, Nature, Science boycott: What was Randy Schekman's tenure at PNAS like? · Retraction Watch, 2013
  15. 15.Randy Schekman (Nobel Week Dialogue 2018 panellist) · NobelPrize.org, 2018
  16. 16.Glycosylation and processing of prepro-alpha-factor through the yeast secretory pathway (Julius D, Schekman R, Thorner J), Cell 36(2):309-318 · Cell (via PubMed), 1984
  17. 17.Secretion and processing of insulin precursors in yeast (Thim L et al.), PNAS 83(18):6766-6770 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (via PubMed), 1986
  18. 18.Molecular engineering of insulin for recombinant expression in yeast (Kjeldsen T et al.), Trends in Biotechnology 42(4):464-478 · Trends in Biotechnology (via PubMed), 2024
  19. 19.COPII: a membrane coat formed by Sec proteins that drive vesicle budding from the endoplasmic reticulum (Barlowe C et al.), Cell 77(6):895-907 · Cell (via PubMed), 1994
  20. 20.Cranio-lenticulo-sutural dysplasia is caused by a SEC23A mutation leading to abnormal endoplasmic-reticulum-to-Golgi trafficking (Boyadjiev SA et al.), Nature Genetics 38:1192-1197 · Nature Genetics (via PubMed), 2006
  21. 21.Biopharmaceutical benchmarks 2022 (Walsh G, Walsh E), Nature Biotechnology 40:1722-1760 · Nature Biotechnology (via PubMed Central), 2022
  22. 22.The therapeutic monoclonal antibody market (Ecker DM, Jones SD, Levine HL), mAbs 7(1):9-14 · mAbs (via PubMed Central), 2015
  23. 23.Year in Review: 2022 · Aligning Science Across Parkinson's (ASAP), 2022

Fact-checked on September 24, 2026 by a separate AI fact-checking pass that re-opened the sources, with 8 corrections made. How we check

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