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I'm Geoff Burnstock.
I was brought up in a boxing family,
but then I finished a Ph.D. at
King's College and University
College.
I then did a post-doc at Mill Hill
with Feldberg and then in Oxford
with Edith Bulbring.
I went to America on a
Rockefeller Fellowship
and then took a
lectureship in Australia
because I liked the
Australians more than anybody
else when I was in Oxford.
And after 16 years, I became head
of the Department of Zoology there.
I returned to London
to UCL to take over
the chair of anatomy and
embryology from J Z Young.
And then when I stepped down
from the headship in '97,
they set up me up with the research
at the Autonomic Neuroscience
Research Institute at
the Royal Free Hospital.
And I am passionate for
research even at my age of 85.
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The purinergic signaling
hypothesis-- that
is ATP is an extracellular signaling
molecule-- was proposed in 1972.
But it was not widely accepted
until the early 1990s when receptors
for ATP were cloned
and characterized.
It is now a field that
is expanding rapidly
in many different directions in both
neuronal and non-neuronal tissues.
In this talk, I will
focus on the role of ATP
as a neurotransmitter at both
autonomic neuromuscular junctions
and in the synaptic
transmission both in
the peripheral and
central nervous systems.
So I'll begin with the discovery
of purinergic neuromuscular
transmission,
but first I need to explain that
autonomic neurotransmission is
at non-synaptic sites.
Varicose fibers involve release
of transmitter en passage,
so they are a transient
contact with effector cells
to form neuromuscular injunctions.
