Geoffrey Burnstock [age 91] obituary | Shifted ATP paradigm - gut nerves | Neuroscience | The Guardian.
Undeterred, Burnstock went further and showed that cells in other parts of the autonomic nervous system released both the classical neurotransmitter noradrenaline and ATP, in breach of Eccles’s and Dale’s dictum.
Not until the early 1990s did evidence emerge that finally convinced the doubters. New techniques in molecular biology made it possible to isolate and identify a family of receptors on cell surfaces for ATP and its breakdown product adenosine; and Burnstock’s team threw themselves into discovering what happened when they activated or blocked these receptors.