Roger Y Tsien talks funding fruit flies jellyfish

Description: At this year's symposium with the 2008 U.S. Nobel Laureates, held at the Embassy of Sweden in Washington, DC, Chemistry Nobelist Roger Y. Tsien described the "vagaries of funding" in basic research. Here, he jokes about Sarah Palin's recent comments on supposedly wasteful spending on fruit fly research, while also describing how much of this Nobel-prizewinning work was conducted on a shoestring budget.

Roger Yonchien Tsien is an American biochemist and a professor at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego. 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.

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

Tsien had a number of top engineers in his extended family, including his father Hsue-Chu Tsien 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 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. 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".

Tsien was born in New York, in 1952. He grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Livingston High School there.

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.

He attended Harvard University on a National Merit Scholarship, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. 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.

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.

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.

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. Former trainees include Atsushi Miyawaki and Alice Y. Ting.

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.

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

SOURCE: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Y._Tsien)