During his high school career, Goldberg was a very bright student and became an Eagle Scout. He had the highest score in New York State on the statewide scholarship exam. In the summer between high school and college he landed a job working in a lab for the Burroughs-Wellcome drug company. The lab was headed by George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion and focused its work on purine and pyrimidine antimetabolites. Goldberg was a lab technician collecting data on a research project that eventually ending up producing the drugs azathioprine (Immuran) and azacytosine (AZT). Immuran was the first successful nonsteroid immunosuppressant used in kidney transplants and AZT became the first successful treatment for AIDS. For their major discovery, Hitchings and Elion shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988.
