Irwin Rose

Origins and early life

Irwin Allan Rose was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 16 July 1926 into a secular Jewish family, the son of Harry Royze, who kept a flooring store, and Ella Greenwald. He spent a year at Washington State University, served in the Navy during the Second World War, and on his return took a bachelor's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in biochemistry in 1952, both at the University of Chicago, followed by postdoctoral work at New York University.

Work and career

He taught biochemistry at Yale from 1954 to 1963 and then joined the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where he stayed until he retired in 1995. Biologists had long studied how cells build proteins; Rose asked the opposite question, how a cell takes one apart on purpose. Working in the late 1970s with Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover, who spent their summers in his laboratory, he showed that a small protein called ubiquitin is attached to a doomed protein as a tag, in a chain, and that the tagged molecule is then fed to a shredder and destroyed — and that the cell spends energy to do it, which is why the process is so precise.

Controlled degradation turned out to govern the cell cycle, DNA repair and the immune response, and the pathway is now the target of cancer drugs.

Recognition

The three shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Rose was at the University of California, Irvine, when the prize was announced. He died at Deerfield, Massachusetts, on 2 June 2015.