Renowned biochemist Irwin Rose, the 2004 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, has passed away at the age of 88. He died in his sleep in Deerfield, Massachusetts. He won the Nobel Prize for discovering a way that cells destroy unwanted proteins. Irwin Rose, along with Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, won the Nobel for discovering how plant and animal cells marked old and damaged proteins with the polypeptide ubiquitin.

• Irwin Rose was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 16, 1926.
• He spent much of his career as a researcher at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
• His Nobel-winning work was done there in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Tidbits

• The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1901 to Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff, of the Netherlands.
• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 was awarded jointly to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.
• Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, an Indian-born American and British structural biologist, best known for his pioneering work on the ribosome, won Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009. He shared the same with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath.

GK Questions

• Who discovered Dynamite? Alfred Bernhard Nobel
• Which country presents Right Livelihood Award, which is promoted as an “Alternative Nobel Prize”? Sweden