Roger Tsien
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Roger Y. Tsien 錢永健
Born	February 1, 1952 (1952-02-01) (age 56) New York City, United States
Citizenship	United States
Ethnicity	Chinese American
Fields	Biochemistry
Institutions	UC San Diego UC Berkeley
Alma mater	Harvard University University of Cambridge
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 Wolf Prize in Medicine 2004

Roger Yonchien Tsien (traditional Chinese: 錢永健; simplified Chinese: 钱永健; pinyin: Qián Yǒngjiàn¹; born February 1, 1952) is an American biochemist and a professor at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego.² He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry "for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) with two other chemists: Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Osamu Shimomura of Boston University and Marine Biological Laboratory.³

Family, birth and education

Tsien and his family are descendants of the royal family of the Kingdom of Wuyue. According to historic records, Tsien is the 34^th-generational grandson of the King Qian Liu (Tsien Liu) ⁴.

Tsien had a number of top engineers in his extended family, including his father Hsue-Chu Tsien (simplified/ traditional Chinese: 钱学榘/ 錢學榘) who was a mechanical engineer and his mother's brothers who were engineering professors at MIT. Both of Tsien's parents came from Zhejiang Province, China. The famous rocket scientist Tsien Hsue-shen (pinyin: Qian Xuesen; simplified/ traditional Chinese: 钱学森/ 錢學森), regarded as the co-founding father of JPL of Caltech and later the director of the Chinese ballistic-missile program, is a cousin of Tsien's father ⁵. Tsien's brother Richard Tsien is also a renowned scientist at Stanford. Tsien, who calls his own work molecular engineering, once said, "I'm doomed by heredity to do this kind of work".⁶

Tsien was born in New York, in 1952.⁷ He grew up in Livingston, New Jersey⁷ and attended Livingston High School there.⁸

Tsien suffered from asthma as a child, and as a result, he was often indoors. He spent hours conducting chemistry experiments in his basement laboratory. When he was 16, he won first prize in the nationwide Westinghouse talent search with a project investigating how metals bind to thiocyanate.⁷

He attended Harvard University on a National Merit Scholarship, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior.⁹ He graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry and physics in 1972. According to his freshman-year roommate, economist and Iowa politician Herman Quirmbach, “It’s probably not an exaggeration to say he’s the smartest person I ever met... [a]nd I have met a lot of brilliant people.”¹⁰

After completing his bachelor's degree, he joined the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England with the aid of a Marshall Scholarship. He received his Ph.D in physiology from Churchill College, University of Cambridge in 1977. He was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge from 1977 to 1981.

Academic career

After completing his PhD at Cambridge University, he was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1982 to 1989. Since 1989 he has been working at the University of California, San Diego, as Professor of Pharmacology and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Research

Tsien is renowned for revolutionizing the fields of cell biology and neurobiology by allowing scientists to peer inside living cells and watch the behavior of molecules in real time. He is well-known for developing colorful dyes, such as Fura-2, to track the movement of calcium within cells and has genetically modified organisms to produce the molecules that make jellyfish and corals glow, creating fluorescent colors in a dazzling variety of hues. These multicolored fluorescent proteins are used by scientists to track where and when certain genes are expressed in cells or in whole organisms.

In 2004, Tsien was awarded the Wolf Prize in Medicine "for his seminal contribution to the design and biological application of novel fluorescent and photolabile molecules to analyze and perturb cell signal transduction."¹¹ In 2006 he became a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society in the UK. ¹²

In 2008, Tsien shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie for "the green fluorescent protein: discovery, expression and development." ¹³

Awards and honors

Roger Y. Tsien has received several honors and awards in his life, including:

• Lamport Prize, New York Academy of Sciences(1986)
• Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke(1989)
• Young Scientist Award, Passano Foundation(1991)
• W. Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology, Columbia University (1991)
• Artois-Baillet-Latour Health Prize, Belgium (1995)
• Gairdner Foundation International Award, Canada (1995)
• Basic Research Prize, American Heart Association (1995)
• Elected to Institute of Medicine (1995)
• Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998)
• Elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1998)
• Award for Innovation in High Throughput Screening, Society for Biomolecular Screening (1998)
• Herbert Sober Lectureship, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2000)
• Pearse Prize, Royal Microscopical Society (2000)
• ACS Award for Creative Invention, American Chemical Society (2002)
• Christian B. Anfinsen Award, Protein Society (2002)
• Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (2002)
• Max Delbrück Medal, Max Delbrück Centrum für Molekulare Medizin, Berlin (2002)
• Wolf Prize in Medicine, Israel (2004)
• Keio Medical Science Prize, Japan (2004)
• Perl Prize in Neuroscience, U. North Carolina(2005)
• J.Allyn Taylor International Prize in Medicine, Robarts Institute in Canada(2005)
• ABRF Award, Association Biomolecular Resource Facilities(2006)
• Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in the Basic Medical Sciences, Brandeis University(2006)
• Fellow of the Royal Society, UK (2006)
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Sweden(2008)
• E.B. Wilson Medal, American Society for Cell Biology(2008)

Notes

References

• Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2008

External links

• Tsien lab Website
• Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2002
• The Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2004 (detail)
• Research done by Roger Y. Tsien
• The Chemistry of Fluorescent Indicators: the Work of Roger Y. Tsien
• Aglow in the Dark: The Revolutionary Science of Biofluorescence - Popular science book describing history and discovery of GFP and includes a biography of Roger Tsien

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