Giulio L. Cantoni
National Institutes of Health
September 29, 1915 - July 27, 2005
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Scientific Discipline: Biochemistry Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1983)
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Giulio Cantoni identified the mechanism of methylation within biological systems. In 1952, he discovered S-adenosylmethionine, an ATP bound methionine, which serves as a methyl donor for various compounds such as creatine, choline, and methylated sterols and neurotransmitters. This discovery had important implications in the emerging field of epigenetics, which is the study of changes in gene expression caused by DNA modifications such as methylation.
Cantoni received his M.D. from the University of Milan and was a research assistant at the Department of Biochemistry and Physiology there from 1934 to 1939. In 1940, he went to Oxford, England where he was a research assistant at the Department of Pharmacology. He came to the United States, to the University of Michigan Medical School Department of Physiology, as a teacher and research assistant in 1942. From 1943 to 1945 Cantoni served as an Instructor in the Department of Pharmacology at New York University College of Medicine and went on to join the faculty at the Long Island college of Medicine as an Assistant professor of Pharmacology. After serving as a senior fellow at the American Cancer Society from 1948 to 1950, he became an Associate professor of Pharmacology at Western Reserve University School of Medicine. In 1954 he was the Chief of the Laboratory of General and Comparative Biochemistry at the National Institutes of Mental Health.
