Although his father was an Albanian Moslem and his mother an American Baptist, Murad became an Episcopalian and married Carol, a Presbyterian teacher who is the mother of their five grown children. "My parents had a tiny restaurant in our home town of Whiting, Indiana, and I used to wash dishes and wait on tables to cover the cost of my medical studies. I didn't write down what people ate - I memorized the details as a kind of game, and I think that helped me later in my scientific work."

When Dr. Fathi Arafat, president of the Palestinian Red Crescent, learned that Murad had come to Jerusalem to lecture, he informed his brother, Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat, who invited Murad to Gaza for a 30-minute weekend meeting.

Murad, whose university is the largest medical research institution in the world, noted that NO has the ability to dilate blood vessels and relax smooth muscle tissue; this led to its application in the anti-impotence pill (Viagra). But he also predicted that NO will be relevent in the fight against cancer, Alzeimer's disease, heart disease and many other conditions. Altho researchers have long known various details about NO, in 1977 Murad discovered that nitroglycarin pills - used by heart patients for a century - work because they release NO. The colorless, odorless gas signals blood vessels to relax, which lowers blood pressure and relieves the pain of angina pectoris. "For years, colleagues said I was crazy to invest so much time and effort in NO," Murad recalled. "But I was certain right from the beginning."

Ironically, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite (a product in which the explosion-prone nitroglycarin is curbed by being absorbed in a porous soil) became ill with heart disease, and his doctor prescribed nitroglycarin. Nobel refused to take it, knowing that it caused headache and dismissing the possibility that it could eliminate chest pain.