Famous Scientist

Irwin Rose

Irwin A. Rose (born July 16, 1926) is an American biologist. Along with Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.Rose attended Washington State University for one year prior to serving in the Navy during WWII. Upon returning from the war he received his B.S. in 1948 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1952, both from the University of Chicago. He served on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine's department of biochemistry from 1954 to 1963. He then joined Fox Chase Cancer Center's division of basic in 1963 and stayed there until he retired in 1995. He joined University of Pennsylvania during the 1970s and served as a Professor of Physical Biochemistry. He is currently a distinguished professor-in-residence in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine.

Irwin (Ernie) trained several postdoctoral fellows while at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where the groundbreaking Ub work was done. These included Art Haas, the first to see Ubiquitin chains, Keith Wilkinson, the one to first identify APF-1 as Ubiquitin, and Cecile Pickart, a world class enzymologist in many parts of the Ub system.Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines. Among the most important topics are five unifying principles that can be said to be the fundamental axioms of modern biology:

   1. Cells are the basic unit of life
   2. New species and inherited traits are the product of evolution
   3. Genes are the basic unit of heredity
   4. An organism regulates its internal environment to maintain a stable and constant condition
   5. Living organisms consume and transform energy.

Subdisciplines of biology are recognized on the basis of the scale at which organisms are studied and the methods used to study them: biochemistry examines the rudimentary chemistry of life; molecular biology studies the complex interactions of systems of biological molecules; cellular biology examines the basic building block of all life, the cell;

physiology examines the physical and chemical functions of the tissues, organs, and organ systems of an organism; and ecology examines how various organisms interact and associate with their environment.