Julius Axelrod is a biochemist and pharmacologist whose discoveries relating to the role of neurotransmitters in the sympathetic nervous system earned him the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1970, together with Ulf Euler of Sweden and Sir Bernard Katz of Great Britain. As Axelrod himself has said, he was a late starter as a distinguished scientist, due to both the humble circumstances of his birth and his coming of age in the Great Depression of the l930s. He only began real scientific research in 1946, and earned his Ph.D. in 1955. From then on he compensated for lost time and became the first chief of the pharmacology section of the National Institute of Mental Health, a branch of the prestigious National Institutes of Health.

Axelrod was born on May 30, 1912, in a tenement house in New York City, the son of Isadore Axelrod, a maker of flower baskets...