Rose, Irwin, 1926–2015, American biochemist, b. Brooklyn, N.Y., Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1952. Rose was on the faculty of Yale Medical School from 1954 to 1963 and a senior member of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia from 1963 until 1995. After retiring he accepted (1997) a special appointment as a researcher at the Univ. of California, Irvine. In 2004 Rose shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko for their discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. The three scientists elucidated the pathway through which protein degradation takes place in cells, and identified the molecules called ubiquitins as markers that indicate what proteins are to be broken down. Cancer and some degenerative diseases are believed to result from disruptions in this pathway.
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