eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd · CC BY 3.0

A biochemist who, with his longtime research partner Michael Brown at the University of Texas Southwestern, discovered the LDL receptor — the mechanism by which cells pull cholesterol out of the bloodstream. Their work explained why people born without enough of these receptors develop dangerously high cholesterol and heart disease at a young age, and it laid the biological foundation for statin drugs, now taken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The pair shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery.