Nobel City

UCSD a mecca for big thinkers, big honors The Nobel Prize shelf at the University of California San Diego is getting impressively crowded. Roger Tsien, a 56-year-old professor of pharmacology, chemistry and biochemistry, is the latest laureate, winning the Nobel announced this week in chemistry for his work with two other scientists in designing and creating fluorescent molecules that light up the inner workings of living cells. Their work was cited as having opened vast new avenues into research on diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer. Tsien becomes the seventh living Nobel laureate on the faculty at UCSD or its Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In addition, nearly two dozen Scripps scientists are on the roster of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with... [read full story]