As noradrenaline is an intermediate on the path to adrenaline, dopamine is on the path to noradrenaline (and hence adrenaline.) In 1957 dopamine was identified in the human brain by researcher Katharine Montagu. In 1958/59 Arvid Carlsson and his group in the Pharmacology Department of the University of Lund, including the medical students Åke Bertler and Evald Rosengren, not only found dopamine in the brain, but also – like noradrenaline in Marthe Vogts exemplary study – in uneven distribution, quite different from the distribution of noradrenaline. This argued for a function beyond an intermediate. The concentration was highest in the corpus striatum, which contained only traces of noradrenaline. Carlssons group had previously found that reserpine, which was known to cause a Parkinsonism syndrome, depleted dopamine (as well as noradrenaline and serotonin) from the brain. They concluded that ″dopamine is concerned with the function of the corpus striatum and thus with the control of motor function″. Thus for the first time the reserpine-induced Parkinsonism in laboratory animals and, by implication, Parkinsons disease in humans was related to depletion of striatal dopamine. A year later Oleh Hornykiewicz, who had been introduced to dopamine by Blaschko and was carrying out a color reaction on extracts of human corpus striatum in the Pharmacological Institute of the University of Vienna, saw the brain dopamine deficiency in Parkinsons disease ″with his own naked eye: Instead of the pink color given by the comparatively high concentrations of dopamine in the control samples, the reaction vials containing the extracts of the Parkinson's disease striatum showed hardly a tinge of pink discoloration″.
In 1970, von Euler and Axelrod were two of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, “for their discoveries concerning the humoral transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation”, and in 2000 Carlsson was one of three winners who got the prize “for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system”.