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Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2002 for Roger Y. Tsien
April 15, 2002The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
has awarded the
Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics 2002
(USD 150,000) to
Professor Roger Y. Tsien
Department of Pharmacology, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, United States
‘for his extraordinary and unique contribution to the development of a series of methods and techniques for measuring and visualising processes within and between cells’.
The subject
Roger Tsien’s greatest claim to fame in the scientific world comes to him thanks to Aequorea Victoria, a jellyfish which glows brightly in the dark. It can do this thanks to the ‘green fluorescent protein’ molecule, or gfp, which Tsien managed to isolate and clone through the creative use of a variety of techniques. He even managed to synthesise variants with other colours.
Introducing gfp or its variants into a cell has made it possible to follow all kinds of biochemical processes within living cells ‘in real time’: they are literally made visible. Among other things, the technique enables the transmission of signals between cells to be tracked; it can also be used to monitor intracellular acidity and to follow the transmission of sodium and calcium within cells. Carrying out measurements in cell organelles is also possible using gfp. Tsien’s methods are now widely used by other researchers for different purposes, such as searching for the factors which cause the creation of malignant cells. Tsien himself is responsible among other things for laying bare a molecular mechanism involved in the synaptic adaptive capacity of the brain.
Roger Y. Tsien was born in New York in 1952. He studied chemistry and physics at Harvard College, graduating summa cum laude in 1972, following which he joined the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in the uk with the aid of a Marshall scholarship. After obtaining his Ph.D. there in 1977, Tsien remained as a researcher in Cambridge until 1981. He then returned to America to take up a post at Berkeley, where he ultimately became a professor in the Physiology & Anatomy faculty. Since 1989 he has been attached to the University of California in San Diego, as Professor of Pharmacology and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Tsien has been receiving prizes for his work since as far back as 1968, including the W. Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology from the University of Columbia (1991) and the Pearse Prize from the Royal Microscopical Society (2000). Since 1998 he has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
More background information on Roger Y. Tsien can be found on the website: http://www.tsienlab.ucsd.edu
The Prize
The Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics (named after the father of Alfred Heineken) is the oldest of the Heineken Prizes and has been awarded since 1964. Previous Prize-winners in the recent past have included Piet Borst, Michael Berridge, Paul Nurse and James Rothman. Nurse was one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine last year. Further background information about the Prize can be found on the website of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences: http://www.knaw.nl/heinekenprizes
The awards ceremony
The Heineken Prizes are presented every two years during a special session of the Academy. This year’s awards ceremony will take place on Tuesday, 24 September 2002 in the Beurs van Berlage building in Amsterdam.
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)
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