On the Causes of Obesity and Its Treatment: The End of the Beginning
Feb
19
2026
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Jeffrey Friedman
Feb
19
2026
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Jeffrey Friedman
Description
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are transforming human health, with their effectiveness in promoting weight loss. They act like a natural hormone that gets released after eating. Jeffrey Friedman, a physician-scientist at The Rockefeller University, sees the new weight loss drugs as both a medical milestone and a dramatic turning point in the quest to understand the causes of obesity. Friedman is a renowned innovator in research on metabolism. In the mid-1990s, he and his colleagues isolated an obesity-related gene and showed that it encoded a previously unknown hormone, dubbed leptin, that plays a key role in controlling appetite, energy expenditure and fat storage. The discovery of leptin provided compelling evidence of a genetic contribution to obesity and established a model for chemical signaling between the digestive tract and the brain that continues to inform basic research and drug discovery related to obesity.
About the Speakers
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Jeffrey Friedman
Professor
Molecular Genetics, Rockefeller University
Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has won numerous awards, including the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2010 Albert ...
Jeffrey M. Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has won numerous awards, including the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2010 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the 2019 Wolf Prize in Medicine, the 2009 Shaw Prize and the 2005 Gairdner Award. A professor at The Rockefeller University and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute studying the physiologic and genetic mechanisms that regulate food intake and body weight, he and his laboratory in 1994 isolated the mouse ob gene. They demonstrated that it encodes the hormone leptin, which reduces food intake in mice. His current research is aimed at understanding the neural and physiological mechanisms by which leptin transmits its weight-reducing signal.
Location
Welch Hall (WEL), Room 2.122
105 E 24th St.
Parking: Speedway Garage