During a period of a few months in 1980, researchers in the Department of Pharmacology on the third floor of the Basic Science Building would slip, hopefully unnoticed, past a door that now displays a brass plaque: The Furchgott Room.

“Harry, look at this!” would come the voice of Robert F. Furchgott, Ph.D., recalls Harry S. Margolius, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chairman of the Department of Pharmacology. Furchgott, a Charleston native and recently named winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, was at MUSC on sabbatical from State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn in 1980.

MUSC awarded Furchgott an honorary degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, during commencement ceremonies May 16, 1997.

“While here, he asked me if I thought (Dr.) Tom Gaffney (department chairman at the time) would let him have a room to work on a paper he was preparing. And this is the room,” Margolius said, pointing to the plaque.

“He’d be in here working, and we’d hear as we passed by, ‘Look at this.’ He’d show me how a vasodilator, such as acetylcholine or bradykinin enlarges this blood vessel from a rabbit ear. But then he’d run a Q-tip or forceps over the blood vessel and the same vasodilater would make it contract. ‘I wonder why it does that, Harry,’ he’d say.”

That observation and the paper he was preparing in the tiny third-floor room, converted from a cleaned-out storage closet, became first the abstract and then the paper published in Nature (number 288, pages 373-376, 1980), which yielded a Nobel Prize in medicine for Furchgott and two others on Oct. 12.

“While the rest of us were working on our genes, he was using Q-tips,” Margolius said. But what Furchgott was observing had implications for prevention and treatment of heart disease, diabetes, angina, myocardial infarction, and stroke.

Margolius explained that when Furchgott brushed the blood vessel, he damaged or destroyed the single-cell layer of endothelial cells lining the blood vessel. A substance meant to dilate blood vessels—a vasodilator—was triggering a subtle response in the endothelial cells that no one ever realized existed. This thin, delicate layer of cells were evidently releasing a chemical which, in turn, relaxed the muscle cells in the blood vessel, causing it to dilate. When the endothelial cells were removed, the blood vessel’s response to the vasodilator was to contract.

“This discovery led to an understanding of how the endothelial cells regulate vascular smooth muscle tone,” Margolius said.

From this seminal observation, Louis J. Ignarro of the University of California at Los Angeles and Dr. Ferid Murad of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston, who shared the Nobel Prize, independently probed endothelial cells for the chemical they release to control the dilation and constriction of blood vessels. The chemical is nitric oxide, a compound so common and simple, many biomedical scientists at first thought it was a mistake.

Nitric oxide from the endothelium was proven to be the product of that single layer of cells so critical to the regulation of blood flow and so critical to millions of people whose health is either sustained or compromised by diseases affecting vasculature such as hypertension or diabetes. “There are celebrities in science and then there are heros,” Margolius said. He explained that many of the celebrities do great things, but they do it for recognition, or for the prizes. But the heros do it for the science. They study and probe for what they can learn.

“Robert Furchgott is a hero,” Margolius said. “He’s a genuinely modest person, certainly not concerned about prizes.”

Furchgott never did his work for what he could get, but for what he could learn from it, Margolius said. He described a man who, when he was at MUSC for those few months, always wanted to know what others were doing. “‘What are your students up to?’ he would ask. This is the role model I would like all contemporary students of science to be like,” Margolius said.

“To scientists like Robert Furchgott, it’s not how much we know that’s important, but how huge is the universe of what we don’t know.”