The Etymology of Dopamine
Dopamine is one of the more recent words in the etymological dictionary — coined in 1959 to name a molecule whose role in the brain had only just been discovered. The first element, dopa, is an acronym from the German chemical name Dioxyphenylalanin (3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine), in use since 1917; the second, amine, denotes any ammonia derivative. Dopamine had been synthesised in the laboratory long before anyone knew what it did. Then, in the late 1950s, the Swedish pharmacologist Arvid Carlsson showed that dopamine was not simply a precursor of noradrenaline (as believed) but a neurotransmitter in its own right, concentrated in the basal ganglia and crucial for motor control and reward. His work led to the use of L-DOPA in Parkinson’s disease and to the 2000 Nobel Prize. The word dopamine, then, is a Carlsson-era coinage — chemistry’s naming convention applied to a freshly understood piece of the brain.