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Tsien Takes National Spotlight with Nobel Prize Win in Chemistry
Humble Scientist Credits Lowly Jellyfish for Success
Ioana Patringenaru | Oct. 13, 2008
Watch a video of Roger Tsien's remarks on winning the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Rumors had been circulating and expectations had been rising for almost a week after a news service predicted that UC San Diego scientist Roger Tsien would win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year. Tsien himself remained skeptical. But around 2 a.m. Wednesday, rumor became reality. The researcher received a call from the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm and learned that he had indeed become a Nobel laureate.
The Nobel Prize committee decided to recognize Tsien for helping elucidate how the Green Fluorescent Protein, known as GFP, works. The UCSD researcher also extended the protein’s palette beyond green to a rainbow of colors, allowing scientists to assign different colors to various proteins and cells and follow several different biological processes at the same time.
Tsien shares the prize with Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. and of the Boston University School of Medicine and Martin Chalfie of Columbia University in New York. Wednesday, Tsien remained humble in the face of this tremendous recognition.
“I’m not any smarter today then I was yesterday,” he said during a press conference at the Student Services Center on the UCSD campus. “I am not a better scientist.”
But plenty of other people were willing to give Tsien the credit he wasn’t willing to take himself. “Roger, we’re absolutely delighted that you’ve had your work recognized in this very, very important way,” Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said Wednesday. “Like many people who know your work very well and have collaborated with you, I’ve been amazed consistently over the years with the quality and the importance of the contributions you’ve made to the scientific community.” Tsien’s long career on the UC San Diego faculty has strengthened the university as a whole, Fox also said.
Roger Tsien answers questions from reporters on speakerphone. He fielded calls from many national media outlets, including The New York Times, USA Today and National Public Radio.
Tsien is a professor of pharmacology, chemistry and biochemistry at UCSD and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. During Wednesday’s press conference, he made a point to thank the “mobs and mobs of people” he works with on this campus and beyond, including Shimomura and Chalfie. “I need to thank the people in my lab, who actually did the experiments, when I still can’t really do this type of stuff myself, with my own hands,” he said. He singled out Roger Heim, a post doc in his lab, and the first to do hands-on experiments with GFP. As a principal investigator, Tsien fosters a relaxed atmosphere, Heim said. He doesn’t push colleagues to put in long hours or work on the weekends. “He’s more results-driven,” Heim said.
A memorable day
Wednesday did turn out to be a long day for Tsien. He was awakened by the call from Stockholm around 2 a.m. He then spent a good deal of the morning fielding calls from reporters at major news outlets, including The New York Times, USA Today, National Public Radio, Science Magazine and Voice of America. At 10 a.m., he arrived at the Student Services Center for a news conference, where he was welcomed by Daniel Donoghue, chair of UCSD's Academic Senate. More than a half a dozen TV crews and a swarm of press photographers were waiting for him. Tsien toasted his success with champagne and later cut a cake to celebrate. "This is truly a splendid and spectacular day for all of us here," Donoghue said.
Tsien answers questions from the media during a press conference Wednesday. To his immediate right is 10News anchor Hal Clement.
It’s unclear whether Tsien actually got to enjoy the cake. He was quickly pulled into a Q&A session with various TV reporters, including 10News anchor Hal Clement. Later that afternoon, with his wife Wendy at his side, he finally got to relax during a reception at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. More champagne flowed.
“This is the kind of day scientists dream about all their lives,” said Robert Continetti, chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department, where Tsien is a professor. “We’re so excited.”
Tsien is genuine, generous and unconventional, said Joan Heller-Brown, chair of pharmacology, where Tsien also holds an appointment. Indeed, during Wednesday’s press conference, the Nobel laureate thanked…the jellyfish. “The jellyfish has been doing this for probably millions of years and nobody is very grateful to the jellyfish,” he said. “In fact, nobody studies it, actually, anymore.”
Tsien’s research
Tsien came to UCSD from UC Berkeley in 1989. He had already working with UCSD researcher Susan Taylor for some time before making the switch. Taylor said she and Palmer Taylor, now dean of the Skaggs School, worked hard to bring the researcher to campus. His work already spanned many fields at the time and Taylor said she believes the university’s multi-disciplinary focus convinced Tsien to come here.
An image drawn with fluorescent bacteria colonies on an agar plate.
“The heart of this campus is collaboration,” Taylor said. “It was just a place where he could thrive.”
At UCSD, Tsien’s lab began improving and exploiting a green fluorescent protein from Aequorea victoria, a jellyfish that glows brightly in the dark. He and his collaborators also created variants of the protein with other colors. Introducing this molecule or its variants into a cell made it possible to follow all kinds of biochemical processes within living cells ‘in real time’ — they are literally made visible.
“Basically, what he’s allowed us to do is to interrogate the environment of cells,” said Art Ellis, UCSD’s Vice Chancellor for Research, who also is a chemist.
Tsien tamed molecules to track the transmission of signals between cells. He also coaxed them into tracking the transmission of sodium and calcium within cells. The method allows scientist to see when a neuron fires, Tsien said. Many researchers now use the methods he developed for a wide range of experiments, including looking for the factors that cause the creation of malignant cells.
“The work of Dr. Tsien and his colleagues has illuminated the workings of the cell,” said David Brenner, UCSD’s Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences. “He’s a gifted puzzle-solver.”
Most recently, Tsien has turned his attention and intellectual power to cancer. He and his colleagues have devised new strategies to target imaging agents or chemotherapy drugs to tumors and are trying to translate these approaches to the clinic. “It’s a class of diseases that killed my father and my Ph.D. advisor, so it’s touched me personally,” Tsien said. “They’re gone. There’s nothing I can do about it. But it would give me great pleasure to help other patients.”
Tsien toasts his success during a reception at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. From left: Wendy Tsien, David Brenner, vice chancellor for Health Sciences, Nobel Laureate Tsien and Palmer Taylor, dean of the Skaggs School.
Tsien’s life and outreach efforts
Outside of the lab, Tsien found time to jump start BioBridge, an outreach program designed to bring hands-on lab experiments to schools in underserved areas. Students get to manipulate the fluorescent proteins Tsien created in his lab in the past decades.
Tsien remembers that most of his high school classes bored him. But he knew science could be more fun than what he learned in school. As a child, asthma had often kept him indoors, and he passed the time by conducting chemistry experiments. At 16, he won the top prize in the nationwide Westinghouse Talent Search. He then went to Harvard on a National Merit Scholarship and graduated at age 20 with a degree in chemistry and physics.
His graduate work took him to the University of Cambridge, where he was a Marshall Scholar and worked to develop a better dye to track levels of calcium inside cells. He developed organic dyes that twist when they bind with calcium, dramatically changing their fluorescence, and he found a way to insert them into cells without having to inject them. In the early 1990s, he re-engineered GFP to emit colors ranging from blue to yellow. The rest is history.
“He truly has made outstanding contributions in all areas that we associated with a great university like UC San Diego, in research, in education and in service,” Vice Chancellor Ellis said.
Composite image of various fluorescent proteins.
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