Only one Nobel Prize winner has graduated from a Spokane high school. Today would have been his 100th birthday
Irwin Rose always wrote in capital letters.
Like when he wrote to a curious fifth-grade teacher in Pennsylvania who asked for advice to relay to his students.
“I HAVE ALWAYS FELT THAT HUMAN POTENTIAL IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE.”
Rose is the only Nobel laureate to graduate from a Spokane high school. His sons say his advice was emblematic of the kind of person their father was.
“LATER ON WHEN YOU GET INTO ASKING INTERESTING QUESTIONS ABOUT SOME NEW SUBJECT, DON’T FORGET THAT YOU CAN’T SEE AROUND CORNERS,” Irwin Rose continued in his message to the teacher. “SOMETIMES YOU MAY NEED THE HELP OF SOMEONE WITH A DIFFERENT VIEWPOINT.”
Howard Rose, the youngest son of the 2004 Nobel Prize winner who would’ve turned 100 years old Thursday, said his father provided a different viewpoint to the award-winning discovery of the process by which cells remove unwanted proteins.
In collaboration with two Israeli scientists, Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, the precise steps that cells take to remove unwanted proteins were uncovered. In the first step, a small molecule called ubiquitin (which comes from a Latin root meaning “everywhere” because of how prevalent the molecule is across most living organisms) tags a useless protein for destruction.
This tagging of useless proteins was later labeled “the kiss of death” by the Swedish Academy.
“But I should say it is the kiss of life for the cell, because it’s very important to degrade the right protein at the right time, otherwise the cell gets out of control,” Hershko said in a Nobel Laureates 2004 documentary on YouTube.
That protein is then transported to the cell’s “waste disposal unit” known as the proteasome, where the selected protein is terminated and divided into amino acids. Those amino acids can then be repurposed and used as building blocks to form new, useful proteins.
Prior to their research, it was known that proteins in cells degraded, but no one knew how that process occurred. This work was helpful not only for DNA repair, cell cycle control, cancer research and more, but it also started a whole new branch of research in protein degradation, according to Irwin Rose’s son Bob.
“He was the one who understood how the enzymes functioned,” Bob Rose said. “And the other people (Hershko and Ciechanover) really pioneered thinking about the process in the cell and what was going on.”
An enzyme is a specific type of protein that performs a specific function, such as regulating biochemical reactions in living things. Enzymes operate solely as a functional protein, while a protein can be either functional or structural. Bob said his father was a pioneer in helping other scientists understand the way enzymes work.
Rose, Ciechanover and Hershko began studying the degradation of proteins in the 1970s and ’80s, but weren’t rewarded for their efforts until decades later.
Howard said his father once described his work in the following way: “I watch a guy walk into a house and it’s dark and I see lights come on in various rooms of the house. Then he (the guy) walks out the back door, and he’s wearing different clothes. My job is to figure out which room he changed his socks in.”
Bob and Howard say their father never did anything for a prize. Irwin referred to his lab at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia as “Camelot,” Howard said.
“It’s a theater of ideas,” Howard said of his father’s thinking. “It’s not my idea. It’s not your idea. It’s science.”
Irwin Allan Rose was born on July 16, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of 13, Irwin, his mother and his brother, Marvin, moved to Spokane because Marvin suffered from rheumatic fever and needed to be in a drier environment. Irwin’s father, who owned a flooring business in Brooklyn, never made it out to Spokane as he tended to the business, something Irwin “never understood and felt conflicted about,” as he said in a biography on the Nobel Prize website.
Bob, who has a twin brother named Fred, said their father spent many days at a summer camp “somewhere in Idaho” that his aunt owned and operated. In his teenage years, Irwin worked summers in a hospital in Spokane and helped out in the psychological ward. This experience made him consider working in neurobiology.
“We moved from the east coast to the town of Spokane, Washington, when I was about 13 years old,” Irwin said in a December 2004 interview. “And I did not adapt very well to the style of the place, and I spent most of my time in the public library. And I enjoyed the company of the Journal of Biological Chemistry. … I was very unpopular with the other students, so I read the Journal of Biological Chemistry.”
He later credited the time he spent as a 15-year-old flipping through the Journal of Biological Chemistry at the Spokane library as a big reason for him choosing to become a biochemist.
He loved Spokane’s library so much that when he received the Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award from WSU and met then-governor Christine Gregoire, the first thing he spoke to her about was the fact that there had been cuts in the city’s library system.
“There was one day where he decided he was going to send the Nobel Prize to the Spokane library,” Howard said. “It is interesting that the library was that much a part of his mind. If I could think about anything, I think it goes back to that letter. I think he would have a vision of it on the wall, and some kid, like him, would see it and be motivated by it.”
Howard said the Nobel Committee gives out one real Nobel Prize and three replicas. Since Howard wanted the family and his son to inherit the Nobel, he managed to convince his father not to just give one away.
“It’s nothing against the Spokane library,” Howard said.
Rose graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in 1943 and later attended Washington State College, or what’s known today as Washington State University. But he took a hiatus from school and joined the Navy to work on radios. When World War II ended, Irwin found himself in San Francisco and, thanks to the GI Bill, he was eager to return to college.
“He applied to go to Berkeley and he got in, but he couldn’t get into the chemistry programs because they were all full,” Howard said. “So he decided to go back to Washington.”
Bob said Irwin spent another year at Washington State College before transferring to the University of Chicago to finish his bachelor’s and pursue his doctorate. After some post-doctoral work at Case Western and New York University, he joined the biochemistry department at Yale. In 1954, he met his wife, Zelda Budenstein, who was a graduate student, and later a research scientist. They were married for 61 years before Irwin died at the age of 88 in 2015.
About 10 months after Irwin received the Nobel Prize, his eldest child, Sarah, died of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Because of the disease, she was unable to travel to Sweden to watch her father receive the most prestigious award in science.
“He was my inspiration,” Bob said. “I mean, I went into science. I’m the only one of his kids who went into science. He was a good father. He worked a lot, but he could be very playful.”
Bob has memories of his father singing “Ol’ Man River,” by Paul Robeson. The family had an old Buick station wagon that they would sing Al Jolson songs in during long car rides from Philadelphia to Cape Cod. His father used to whistle while he did dishes and loved to listen to opera.
Howard remembers how much their father also used to enjoy sharing the things he loved. When he started playing harmonica, he bought all of his kids harmonicas so they could play together. When he started making his own bread, he got his kids four bread-makers.
“He was not about money,” Howard said. “He was not about fame. He didn’t care about prizes. He did it because he thought things were interesting and important to do, and they needed to be done. I think that’s something that I’ve inherited and my brothers have inherited too.”
Howard has spent his career working in applications of virtual reality for therapy in treating acute and chronic pain and battlefield post-traumatic stress disorder . He founded a company called Frontier Realms that creates experiences for people to deal with their issues through virtual reality.
Fred has a degree in city planning and is interested in alternative economic models to “pure capitalism.” He started a company called Wellspring Cooperative Corporation, which is essentially a network of worker-owned businesses.
And Bob followed closely in his father’s footsteps. Since 2002, he’s been a professor of molecular and structural biochemistry at North Carolina State University. His lab studies the structure and function of carbon fixing enzymes.
The three of them were inspired to go into their respective fields not because there’s opportunity to make a lot of money really fast, but because they’re passionate.
While Irwin’s name and likeness is forever cemented in Stockholm, Sweden, with the likes of Marie Curie, Albert Einstein and his personal hero, Louis Pasteur, perhaps his greatest accomplishment was inspiring his children to pursue what they love.
Not for the money or the fame, but because it needs to be done.
“YOU WILL FIND IT STRANGE TO OPEN A NEW DOOR AND SEE WHAT MARVELOUS THINGS ARE OUT THERE THAT YOU NEVER DREAMT OF,” the final line of Irwin’s letter to the Pennsylvania teacher, Mr. Detweiler, reads. “REMEMBER THERE IS A LOT MORE TO LEARN THAN WE NOW KNOW ABOUT.”