 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to tonight's lecture. My name is Richard Van Bremen and I'm the Director of the Linus Pauling Institute here at Oregon State University. I'd like to welcome you to the public session of the 10th Biennial Linus Pauling Institute International Conference. Held once every two years our conference features presentations from scientists around the world. This year seven different countries are represented. Presentations concerned mechanisms of action and safety and efficacy of botanical dietary supplements and vitamins, minerals and other supplements of all kinds. As always our conference is dedicated to the founder of the Linus Pauling Institute, Professor Linus Pauling himself, a native of Oregon and a 1922 graduate of Oregon State University. Professor Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and then the Nobel Prize in Peace in 1962. Our institute was founded by Linus Pauling in 1973 and we're located here in the center of Oregon State University's main campus in Corvallis. And the institute moved from California where Linus Pauling started it to here at Oregon State in 1996. Our mission is to promote optimum health through cutting-edge research on how consuming vitamins, phytochemicals and dietary supplements can help prevent chronic diseases and slow aging. To introduce our guest of honor tonight I would like to call on the Vice President for Research here at Oregon State University, Dr. Irem Tumor. It's really hard to see everyone's faces so my apologies if I don't make eye contact with anyone. My name is Irem Tumor. I've been serving in the role of Vice President for Research since October here. I was an Associate Dean for Research for Engineering. So I'm an engineer. All these terms and topics are very foreign to me but it's impressive. So welcome to OSU. I hear the conference was really, really successful. As the conference bears the name of the Nobel Laureate, Dr. Linus Pauling. We're delighted to welcome another Nobel Laureate, Dr. Inyaro, our speaker this year for the 10th Biennial Linus Pauling Institute Conference. Dr. Inyaro, am I saying your name right? Good. Shared the Nobel Prize in 1998 in physiology. He'll tell us all about his Nobel Prize so I'm not going to go into the details of trying to pronounce all the terms that you'll do much better at. So I just want to say a few words. I know he told me not to say much but Richard's instructions were different so I'm just going to follow Richard's instructions. First, it is heartwarming and worth noting that Dr. Inyaro interacted several times with Linus Pauling. Their first meeting is the only one I have notes on. It was in 1956 where Dr. Inyaro was still attending high school in Brooklyn, his native Brooklyn, I believe. While in New York, Dr. Pauling accepted an invitation from the chemistry teacher from Luz High School to help set up a teaching laboratory and give a general chemistry experimental demonstration. I know you told me, you thought he was special even back then, right? So clearly this meeting helped inspire a young Lou Inyaro to pursue a life and career engagement scientific inquiry and discovery to foster well-being and help others. Dr. Inyaro received his BS in pharmacy from Columbia University in 1962, the same year Dr. Pauling received his Nobel Peace Prize. He earned his PhD in pharmacology in 1966 from the School of Medicine at the University of Minnesota where he studied under eventual Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul Boyer. It was during this time Dr. Inyaro began his studies of cardiovascular physiology. After postdoctoral research in chemical pharmacology at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Inyaro worked at Geikik Pharmaceuticals until he joined Tulane University School of Medicine where he achieved a rank of professor in pharmacology. His work at Tulane gave the insight that would eventually lead to his Nobel Prize. Dr. Inyaro moved to UCLA School of Medicine, obviously they poached you I'm guessing in 1985 to continue research and teaching. Among his many scientific awards, Dr. Inyaro has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine, which is a huge accomplishment. In addition to his scientific achievements though, Dr. Inyaro has been honored year after year as an outstanding teacher, which is difficult to do at the top at the height of your research career. We all know that as professors. First while on the faculty of Tulane University and then at UCLA where he's currently a professor emeritus in the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology. The title of Dr. Inyaro's lecture today is The Road to Stockholm a Nobel Mission. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Inyaro. Thanks very much, Professor Tumor. Very nice introduction. I even learned something about myself from what you were saying. I want to thank also Richard von Bremen and Professor Maria Clara Franco for organizing a spectacular meeting and especially my thanks go to Richard for inviting me to come to this conference and visit for the first time, not only the Linus Pauling Institute, but Corvallis, which I assure you is far more peaceful than Los Angeles, where I'm from. And I want to welcome all of you to this lecture. I know some of you are scientists. There remains of the end of the present conference and plus this was open to the public. So there are some people in the audience who are not scientists. So when I give my presentation, I promise to make it as contained as little science as possible. I might just divert a little bit on certain slides to explain some of the chemistry. So hopefully the nine scientists will forgive me for doing this. But again, it's a great honor and a pleasure to be here. So I'm going to start my presentation. Let's see if I can do this correctly. There we go. So I'm going to talk to you about a molecule called nitric oxide, which in my opinion is a truly remarkable molecule. And often when I give this talk, I label that as I title the talk, the road to Stockholm, a Nobel mission. And I think you'll see what I mean as I go through this. But I want to start off by describing some of my interests and hobbies as a young child, because I think that this is pertinent to what I have to say today. But I was always interested in chemistry, believe it or not, even when I was 10 years old. And I enticed my parents to buy me a chemistry set. And I remember it was a Gilbert chemistry set. And my parents were immigrants from Italy. They never received the formal education. They never even went to the first grade. My dad was a carpenter. My mom had to stay home and take care of my brother and I and do all the cooking for my hardworking father. That's the way it was back in the 1940s in the New York City area. So my dad had no problems with my getting chemistry set. He didn't understand it. And he thought, well, we should allow our sons to do whatever they want to do. So my mom, though, of course questioned that. She said to me, what are you going to do with the chemistry set? And I said, I'm going to read the manual and I'm going to do some experiments with the chemicals that come with the chemistry set. And she said, at 10 years old, you're going to do that? And I said, yes, mom, really. So they bought me the chemistry set. But of course I had some deviant goals like making rocket fuel and firecrackers, which I successfully did. However, the chemistry set didn't come with some of those chemicals. So I had to entice my older friends who had brothers to go to the local pharmacies to get some chemicals. And back then, the pharmacies had all these chemicals because they compounded prescriptions. They made them. They didn't get them from a drug company and then pour them in another bottle and then put a label on it and give it to you. I mean, they actually compounded them. So that was my first encounter with things like sulfur, charcoal, powder, and potassium nitrate. And I actually developed an understanding of these chemicals and how to mix them together just right. So I want to say something about Linus Pauling, not only because I'm here, but because I had an encounter with him as you heard. So Linus Pauling received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and then in 1962 the Peace Prize for his opposition to weapons of mass destruction. The Chemistry Prize was for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances. One of his greatest accomplishments was to show for the first time the structure of proteins and their spiral nature. And this discovery led to subsequent discoveries as well that others made involving, for example, the DNA double helical structure and so on. He was quite a chemist, quite a scientist. And my encounter with Linus Pauling, as you heard, was when I was a junior or third year high school student in 1956. I was 15 years old and I questioned my teacher as to why we didn't have a chem lab. We had a physics course in a physics lab. We had a chemistry course, but no chem lab. And, you know, I loved playing with chemicals. I wanted a chemistry lab. I was very disappointed. And so I asked the teacher, you know, how do you expect to teach chemistry without a laboratory? I said it politely, though, and not like that. And so he heard me a few weeks later. He told me he had a surprise. He was going to invite a famous chemist, friend of his, to come to the school for a few hours or a day to help us give us some advice as to how to set up the laboratory. And when I asked him who it was, he said that it was Professor Linus Pauling. And I was really surprised, and the teacher was surprised that I knew of his name. I had been reading chemistry books, so of course I knew who he was. And I knew that he was awarded the Nobel Prize just recently, which was actually two years before that. So he helped to set up the laboratory. And what I was most taken by him was just the way he talked to me and some of the other students. He had a way of describing and explaining chemistry, elementary chemistry, of course. But in a way that was very easy to understand, and he was very emotivating. And I think that when I think about it, he certainly was one of the most important motivating factors in my success as a chemical pharmacologist. Pharmacology is the study of drugs on living tissues. And many people take a physiological approach to studying pharmacology, or a biochemical approach. But he influenced me so much in chemistry, I wanted to take a chemical approach, which was pretty new at the time that I went to graduate school. And I was very lucky that when I did my postdoc at the NIH, the NIH had just established a new lab called the Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology. So I applied there, got in, and I learned even more about chemical applications to pharmacology.