[1] Though his father, who was originally from Wisconsin, had attended Grinnell College for two years, he ultimately led an agrarian lifestyle that took him to both New Mexico and Oklahoma before settling down in Burlingame to raise a family.

To provide for the family, Sutherland's father ran a dry goods store, where he gave each of his children working jobs.

[3][4] Under Cori's guidance, Sutherland conducted research on the effects of the hormones epinephrine and glucagon on the breakdown of glycogen to glucose.

Sutherland accredits his decision to pursue a research career, as opposed to entering the medical profession, to his mentor Cori.

He continued his work on cyclic AMP, receiving financial support from the Career Investigatorship awarded to him by the American Heart Association in 1967.

Cori's laboratory had previously established the basic mechanism of glycogen metabolism, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

There, he worked in collaboration with Ted Rall, Walter D Wosilait, and Jacques Berthet to publish a series of papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, "The Relationship of Epinephrine and Glucagon to Liver Phosphorylase", which was released in four parts.

[10] In a later experiment, they demonstrated that more phosphate is taken up in liver slices when epinephrine and glucagon are added, suggesting that these hormones were promoting the phosphorylation of LP, activating the enzyme.

This stage response was characterized by the particulate fraction producing an unknown heat stable factor in the presence of the hormones epinephrine and glucagon.

[11] This unknown heat stable factor, which was produced in the presence of hormones and ultimately led to the secondary formation of liver phosphorylase, was later termed cyclic AMP.

[12][13] Even though the discovery of cyclic AMP and the idea of second messengers were of great importance to the world of medicine, Sutherland's findings were actually achieved through strenuous trial and error.

Once they had witnessed nearly a doubling of the rate of LP activation, they knew this belief in that keeping cells intact was crucial to studying the effects of hormones was not necessarily true, at least in this case.

Berthet not only demanded this step of the procedure be done through careful aspiration, he also critiqued the lack of specificity during centrifugation with respect to suspension height, rpm and time.

In 1944, during World War II, Sutherland was called into service as a battalion surgeon under General George S. Patton, and was later sent to Germany, where he served as a staff physician in a military hospital until 1945.

[2] In 1952, Sutherland was awarded the Banting Memorial Lectureship and, in 1953, was elected as the Chairman of the Case Western Reserve University Department of Pharmacology in Cleveland, Ohio.

He was awarded the Career Investigator position at the American Heart Association in 1967 and was elected as member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1973.

In 1976, Vanderbilt University created the Sutherland Prize which is awarded annually to a faculty member whose work has garnered them national, if not international, acclaim and respect.