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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.


Biography

Rose was born in Brooklyn, New York into a secular Jewish family, the son of Ella (Greenwald) and Harry Royze, who owned a flooring store. Rose attended Washington State University for one year prior to serving in the Navy during World War II. 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.