Neuroscience and Neurochemistry

Biography

Geoffrey Burnstock was born in London, England, in 1929. He finished his secondary education at Greenford County Grammar School in 1946 and then spent 1947 doing National Service with the Air Force. Burnstock then enrolled in science courses at the Kingston Technical Institute and worked weekends in the graveyard. In 1950, he was accepted into King’s College, University of London. Here he completed a BSc degree (1953), majoring in mathematics and physics. He then went on to complete a PhD (1957) at King’s College and University College London, University of London. Burnstock’s PhD research was in the field of zoology, where he examined gut motility in fish. In 1956, he was invited to join the Physiology Department at the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London (1956-57). Whilst there, he developed the ‘sucrose gap technique’ for recording from smooth muscle. This led to a position in the Department of Pharmacology at Oxford University (1957-59). After spending a year at the University of Illinois on a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship (1959), Burnstock took the leap to Australia.

Research Interest

His lasting work with ATP-related signalling was first published in the 1970s, which led to a rapid surge in interest in the field and subsequently made him the most cited scientist in pharmacology and toxicology for several years during the 2000s. Much of our understanding of purinergic signaling and the current classification of purinergic receptors is attributed to the work of Burnstock.[6] He was the founding president of the International Society for Autonomic Neuroscience.