Roderick MacKinnon was born in 1956 in Burlington, Massachusetts, a town northwest of metropolitan Boston. He was one of seven children and attended public school. When he was in the ninth grade, the family moved to Cohasset, on the South Shore of the Massachusetts Bay. MacKinnon acknowledges an early interest in science and a love of solving puzzles. His parents supported the idea that all their children go to college and pursue their choice of careers. MacKinnon was encouraged to go his own way, a trait that has led to a series of turns in his career path that proved to be the right turns.
After high school, MacKinnon entered Brandeis University and received a BA in biochemistry in 1978. He then attended medical school at Tufts University and received his MD in 1982. His choice of schools was influenced by his wife's job in Boston and her not wanting to leave the Boston area. MacKinnon completed a three-year residency at Beth Israel Hospital at Harvard Medical School in 1985. He said medical school taught him to teach himself.
It taught me to be very independent by just going to learn something. . . I learned to fearlessly pick up books, go get books and learn a subject, and that certainly came in handy as time went on.
In 1986, having completed the rigors of medical training, MacKinnon decided that being a physician was not the career he wanted and so he made a turn towards research. With the support of an understanding wife, he returned to Brandeis on a postdoctoral fellowship to work in the laboratory of Dr. Christopher Miller, who had been a teacher and mentor when MacKinnon was an undergraduate student. His research involved studying potassium ion channels which allow specific salts (ions) and water to pass through pores and enable electrical signals to reach muscles and nerves in the body.
In 1989, MacKinnon joined the faculty at Harvard Medical school as an assistant professor, where he continued his research and rose to the rank of full professor. In 1996, MacKinnon made another turn and left his tenured position at Harvard to join Rockefeller University as professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. One postdoctoral student came with him to his new laboratory. His only other research associate was his very understanding wife who is a chemist.
He had met with Torsten Wiesel, then the president of Rockefeller, and the two scientists discussed MacKinnon's idea of using X-ray crystallography to attempt to define the structure of the ion channel. Wiesel promised funding for
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