Ricardo Miledi

Ricardo Miledi (born 1927) is a Mexican neuroscientist and a professor at University of California, Irvine, who is known for work on the role of calcium in neurotransmitter release. He received undergraduate and medical degrees at National Autonomous University of Mexico. While in medical school, he decided that he would make a "terrible clinician", as "he imagined that he would end up seeing only one patient per week, because he would always be too interested in every unknown detail of the case, trying to work out how medicines might act." As a result, when required to perform social service as a component of his training in medical school, he chose a research fellowship at the Instituto Nacional de Cardiología under Arturo Rosenblueth. There, he studied the electrical origins of ventricular fibrillation and became skilled at delicate laboratory work.
In 1955, he spent a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood's Hole. There, he began his study of synapses in the common squid and began to see the importance of calcium in synaptic transmission. In 1958, he met frequent collaborator Noble Laureate Bernard Katz, who offered him a position in the Department of Biophysics at University College London. There, he studied the release of Acetylcholine(ACh) and the expression of its receptors. In the early 1960s, he again became interested in the role of calcium. He found that "in zero-Ca2+ medium, the nerve impulse still fully invades the nerve terminal, but does not release any neurotransmitter. And then as soon as you give a little Ca2+ , you get neurotransmitter release." He and Katz published a paper establishing the major role of Ca2+ in ACh release. Further work with squid contributed to an even better understanding of the role of Ca2+ in neurotransmitter release.
His awards include the Royal Medal (1998), the Prince of Asturias Award (1999), and the Society for Neuroscience's Ralph W. Gerard Prize for outstanding contributions to the field (2010).