Dr. David Mangelsdorf, Chair of Pharmacology, was recruited to campus by Dr. Gilman.

Storytelling interspersed a day of scientific celebration, including one that sums up Dr. Alfred G. Gilman’s feisty personality.

Dr. David Mangelsdorf, Chair of Pharmacology, recounted that he was one of many in the UT Southwestern community who through the years enjoyed meeting Dr. Gilman after work in the A.W. Harris Faculty and Alumni Center. The meetings habitually were conducted in a quiet corner where there now is a mounted commemorative plaque in the late Nobel Laureate's honor.

When Dr. Gilman became too sick with cancer to come to campus, however, the meetings moved to his home, often in the backyard.

“On one such occasion, when I was about to die from heat exhaustion and getting eaten alive by bugs, I finally asked Al – who was quite comfortably sitting there without a mosquito around him – ‘Can we please go back inside? ’ ” Dr. Mangelsdorf recalled. “Al looked at me with that slightly mischievous smile, and he said, ‘Davo, one of the wonders of pharmacology is that when you are as sick as I am and loaded up with the drugs they have me on, the last thing you have to worry about are mosquitos. I dare the little [expletives] to drink my blood!

“That was Al Gilman. He always had a way of putting things into perspective, whether it was in science or in life,” Dr. Mangelsdorf said. “He certainly was one of a kind, one of the greatest. And we will miss him.”

– Deborah Wormser