Nobel laureate and ASCB member Roger Y. Tsien died August 24 in Eugene, OR, according to an official statement from the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine where Tsien was on the faculty for 27 years. He was 64. Tsien won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with ASCB member Marty Chalfie and with Osamu Shimomura for their work in developing green fluorescent protein (GFP) as molecular tags, transforming microscopy and setting off a revolution in cell imaging.
A professor of pharmacology, chemistry, and biochemistry at UCSD, Tsien was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Tsien was a continuous ASCB member since 1987. He gave the Keith Porter Lecture at the 2003 ASCB Annual Meeting and in 2008 was jointly awarded with Chalfie the E.B. Wilson Medal, the ASCB’s highest scientific honor. Tsien and Chalfie flew to the ASCB meeting in San Francisco within days of accepting their Nobel medals in Stockholm. Besides his Wilson lecture, Tsien also served as a judge at the 2008 ASCB CellSlam, a stand up science comedy contest.
Tsien was born in New York City on February 1, 1952, the child of Chinese immigrants, into an extended family of engineers. He grew up in Livingstone, NJ, and demonstrated a flair for science at an early age, winning what was then the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in 1968 for a project demonstrating how metals bind to thiocyanate. He attended Harvard College on a National Merit Scholarship, graduating in 1972 with a degree in chemistry and earned his doctorate in physiology in 1977 from the University of Cambridge in the UK. After postgrad work in Cambridge, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982 before moving to UCSD in 1989.
The first green fluorescent protein was discovered in the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, by Shimomura who was at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. Chalfie at Columbia University was the first to demonstrate that GFP, which glowed under ultraviolet light, could work as a molecular tag in a living organism, Caenorhabditis elegans. Tsien explored the biochemistry of GFP and extended the color palette so that different biological processes could be followed at the same time with differently colored GFPs. In a 2008 interview, Tsien said, “I’ve always been attracted to colors. Color helps make the work more interesting and endurable. It helps when things aren’t going well. If I had been born colorblind, I probably never would have gone into this.”
About the Author:
John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.
