UCSD Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien Dies

I was fortunate to see him talk at UCSD recognizing his Nobel prize in 2008. Standing room only, isles filled with folks sitting down likely against fire code. Despite the vast number of people there to see him talk, he was astoundingly humble and basically described how everyone else did the hard work and deserved his award; he was just merely connecting the dots. A great individual who will clearly be missed.

He was my "academic grandfather" (I did research in Amy Palmer's lab at CU Boulder). The number of applications of the fluorescent proteins he helped develop into research tools is staggering. The article mentions their use in cancer and HIV research, but those are just a couple of applications -- at CU we used fluorescent proteins in combination with the phenomenon of fluorescence resonance energy transfer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Förster_resonance_energy_tra...) to measure metal ion concentrations in various parts of the cell (my work was specifically calcium ions in mitochondria) in real-time (we were looking at amyloid precursor proteins to investigate Alzheimer's disease). It's hard to overstate how useful this research tool is. Roger will be missed.

Roger's creative use of fluorescent protiens is a significant foundation of modern molecular biology. A huge number of therapies, technologies and underatanding of biology come not just from our ability to 'see' the biological tools themselves, but from the idea that a novel biological tool can be made from conferring the properties of one protien with the properies of another. Unfortunate to lose him.