Irwin A. Rose, a 2004 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, died on June 2 in Deerfield, Mass at 88. Rose expired at the home of his son Robert Rose.

The Brooklyn-born biochemist made a phenomenal revelation and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry for explaining the process of degradation of unwanted proteins by the body cells.

Rose shared the credit with two Israeli scientists, Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, whose discovery of how the living cells in the body mark certain undesirable molecules and break them down led to the development of new medical therapies for treating life-threatening diseases.

These scientists revealed a molecule called ubiquitin that marks the unwanted molecules for destruction. Once the idle molecules are identified, ubiquitin destroys them by a process named molecular ‘kiss of death’; these molecules are engulfed by ubiquitin and disposed.

The potential of ubiquitin was tested by these scientists in early 1980s at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

A 2004 news release by the Nobel committee commended the superb research explaining that after being targeted, the unwanted proteins were sent into cellular ‘waste disposers’. It added that certain structures known as proteasomes are contained within individual cells and it is here that the undesired protein molecules are broken down.

It was this news release that described the engulfing of the proteins as a biochemical ‘kiss of death’ stating that this destruction process by ubiquitin is not indiscriminate and only specific futile proteins are eliminated.