Qian Yongjian
[Edit this paragraph] 1. Chinese-American chemist
One of the 2008 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry
Personal profile
Name: Roger Yonchien Tsien English: Roger Yonchien Tsien. Roger Qian
Gender: Male
Born: May 1952
Born in: New York Growing up: Livingston, New Jersey Nationality: American Ancestor: Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
Father: Qian Xueju, an engineer at Boeing Company in the United States (same Qian Wangdi as Qian Xuesen) 34th generation grandchild) Mother: Li Yiying
Uncle: Engineering professor at MIT.
Brother: Richard Tsien, neurobiologist, academician of the National Academy of Sciences, professor at Stanford University, former chairman of the Department of Physiology
Cousin: Qian Yonggang (Qian Xuesen’s The eldest son), a senior engineer at a research institute of the People's Liberation Army and a part-time professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Honor:
In 1968, he won the Westinghouse Scientific Genius Award for the topic of how metals combine with thiocyanates. Award (The Westinghouse Science Talent)
In 1972, he received the National Merit Scholarship and entered Harvard University to obtain a bachelor's degree (chemistry and physics, Witha National Merit Scholarship)
In 1977, he received PhD and Postdoc (Physiology), University of Cambridge.
In 1981, Qian Yongjian came to the University of California, Berkeley, and worked here for 8 years, becoming a university professor.
In 1989, Qian Yongjian moved his laboratory to the University of California, San Diego, where he is now a professor of pharmacology and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry.
In 1995, he was elected as an academician of the American Academy of Medicine.
In 1998, he was elected as an academician of the National Academy of Sciences and an academician of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Important awards
In 1968, he won the Westinghouse Science Talent Award for his work on how metals combine with thiocyanates
1991 In 1995, the Passano Foundation Young Scientist Award;
In 1995, the Artois-Baye-Latour Health Award in Belgium;
In 1995, the Gairdner Foundation International Award;
1995, American Heart Association Basic Research Award;
2002, American Chemical Society Innovation Award;
2002, Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences Marine Biology Chemistry and Biophysics Award;
In 2004, the Israeli Wolf Prize in Medicine, one of the world's highest achievement awards.
In 2004, he won many awards including the Wolf Prize in Medicine, the American Chemical Society, and the Protein Society
In 2008, he collaborated with American biologist Martin Shah. Two scientists, Elfi and Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist Osamu Shimomura, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year for their research on green fluorescent protein.
Research on bioluminescence phenomena
In 1994, Chinese-American scientist Roger Y Tsien began to modify GFP and made many discoveries. Most of the ones used in the world are variants modified by Qian Yongjian's laboratory. Some have stronger fluorescence, some are yellow or blue, and some can be activated and change color. It has become a hobby of some people to look for colored proteins in organisms that are not commonly used as research models. This phenomenon is just like the wave after the discovery of polymerases for PCR that were widely used in thermophilic organisms. But I didn’t really find many useful things. A successful example is the discovery of other fluorescent proteins from corals by Sergey A. Lukyanov's laboratory at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, including red fluorescent protein.
The phenomenon of bioluminescence has been studied by Osamu Shimomura and Johansson before. Fireflies fluoresce because luciferase catalyzes the substrate molecule luciferin, which undergoes chemical reactions such as oxidation to produce fluorescence. The protein itself emits light without the need for a substrate. It originated from the research of Osamu Shimomura and Johansson.
Shimomura Osamu and Johnson have used several experimental animals. The one related to this story is the jellyfish whose scientific name is Aequorea victoria. In 1962, Osamu Shimomura and Johnson reported in the Journal of Cellular and Comparative Physiology that they isolated and purified the photoluminescent protein aequorin in jellyfish. It is said that when Osamu Shimomura was extracting luminescent protein from jellyfish, he was going home from work one day. He poured the product into the pool. After turning off the lights before going out, he reluctantly looked back at the pool and saw the pool sparkling. Because the pond also received water from the fish tank, he suspected that the ingredients in the fish tank affected the jellyfish, and soon he determined that calcium ions enhanced the luminescence of the jellyfish. In 1963, they reported the relationship between calcium and aequorin luminescence in Science magazine. Later, Ridgway and Ashley proposed that jellyfish could be used to detect calcium concentration, creating a new method for detecting calcium. Calcium ions are important signaling molecules in living organisms. Aequorin became the first calcium detection method with spatial resolution and is one of the methods still used today.
In 1955, Davenport and Nicol discovered that jellyfish can emit green light, but they did not know why. In the 1962 article by Osamu Shimomura and Johnson on the purification of aequorin, there was a footnote saying that another protein was discovered, which appeared green under sunlight, yellow under tungsten wire, and intense green under ultraviolet light. . They then carefully studied its luminescent properties. In 1974, they purified this protein, which was called green protein at the time and later called green fluorescent protein GFP. Morin and Hastings proposed that energy transfer can occur between aequorin and GFP. Aequorin emits light when stimulated by calcium, and its energy can be transferred to GFP, stimulating GFP to emit light. This is the discovery in biology of what is known in physical chemistry as fluorescence vibration energy transfer (FRET).
Shimomura Osamu himself is not interested in the application prospects of GFP, nor is he aware of the importance of its application. After he left Princeton and went to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, his colleague Douglas Prasher became very interested in inventing biological tracer molecules. In 1985, Plattish and Japanese scientist Satoshi Inouye independently obtained the gene for aequorin (cDNA to be precise) based on the protein sequence. In 1992, Plattish obtained the GFP gene. With cDNA, it is easy for general biological researchers to use, and it is much more convenient than using proteins.
After Plattish published the cDNA of GFP in 1992, he stopped doing scientific research. When he applied for the National Science Foundation, the reviewers said that there was no precedent for protein luminescence, and even if he found it, it would be of little value. In a fit of rage, he left academia and went to work for the Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Services Division at the Massachusetts Air National Guard Base. At that time, if he spent a few dollars, he could do a very beautiful job that any average graduate student could do: put the jellyfish GFP gene into other organisms, such as bacteria, and see fluorescence, which completely proves that GFP itself can emit light. No other substrates or auxiliary molecules are required.
The work of expressing GFP into other organisms was carried out independently in 1994 by two laboratories: Marty Chalfie's laboratory working on nematodes at Columbia University, and the University of California, San Diego and Scripps Marine Research. Two Japanese scientists at the institute, Inouye and Tsuji.
Aequorin and GFP both have important applications. But aequorin is still a type of luciferase, and it requires luciferin. The GFP protein itself emits light, which is a major breakthrough in principle.
Chalfie's article immediately caused a sensation, and many biological researchers introduced GFP into their own systems.
If you express GFP in a new system, you can publish articles in Nature and Science. In fact, it is just following the trend and has no originality.
Looking at the entire process, from 1961 to 1974, the research of Osamu Shimomura and Johansson was far ahead, but few people paid attention to it. Other biochemists can also obtain aequorin and GFP if they wish, and the technology is not particularly difficult. After 1974, especially after the 1980s, it was easy for many graduate students to do subsequent work. The exception is that Tsien's lab discovered variants with new colors that were not immediately obvious.
Research content
Qian Yongjian is an important scientist related to Shimomura Osamu's research. Two of his important works in imaging technology are related to Osamu Shimomura.
The first item is calcium dye
In 1980, Qian Yongjian invented a dye molecule for detecting calcium ion concentration. In 1981, he improved the method of introducing dye into cells, and later invented more and more Good dyes are widely used. There are three methods for detecting calcium: selective electrodes, aequorin, and calcium dyes. Before Qian Yongjian's calcium dye appeared, only aequorin had spatial detection capabilities. However, aequorin needed to be injected into cells at that time, making its application inconvenient. However, Qian Yongjian's dye could penetrate into cells. Aequorin and calcium dyes each have their own advantages and disadvantages. Currently, many people use dyes. Qian Yongjian also invented a variety of dyes for studying other molecules.
The second item is GFP
Since 1994, Qian Yongjian began to study GFP, improving the luminous intensity and luminescent color of GFP (inventing variants, many different colors), inventing more Multiple application methods to illustrate the principle of luminescence. Most of the FP used in the world are variants invented by him. His patent is used by many people and sold by companies.
Qian Yongjian’s work has attracted attention since the beginning of the 1980s. He is probably the scientist who is invited to give most academic lectures in the world, because both chemistry and biology have to listen to his lectures, which include technical applications and some very interesting phenomena. He was born in 1952, and his age allowed him to wait many years (but the 80-year-old Osamu Shimomura did not have this advantage). Therefore, Qian Yongjian has been considered by many people to win the Nobel Prize for many years, either in chemistry or physiology. It must be pointed out that Qian Yongjian was very positive about Xiu Shimomura's work, and Qian publicly introduced Xiu Shimomura's findings earlier.
The two brothers won the Rhodes and Marshall Scholar Awards respectively (generally considered to be the two most competitive scholarships for American college students, President Clinton once won the Rhodes).
Qian Xuesen’s cousin and the two brothers An American scientist *** won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
China News Service, October 8 (Xinhua) Comprehensive report, the Nobel Prize Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced at around 11:45 local time on October 8 (Beijing) Time (around 17:45 on October 8) announced that the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded to Japanese-American scientist Osamu Shimomura, American scientist Martin Chalfie, and Chinese-American scientist Qian Yongjian. The three of them made outstanding achievements in the discovery of green fluorescent protein. The three of them will share the Nobel Prize.
Osu Shimomura and Martin Chalfie were born in 1928 and 1947 respectively. He invented the multi-color fluorescent protein labeling technology, which brought a revolution to the development of cell biology and neurobiology.
According to tradition, the 2008 Nobel Prize Award Ceremony will be held on December 10 this year. The prizes for Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Economics will all be held in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. This year's Nobel Prize prize money is still 10 million Swedish krona (approximately 1.4 million U.S. dollars).
Awards Ceremony
Gonno Erqvist, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, first read out the list of winners. He said the three scientists received the award for their contributions to the discovery and study of green fluorescent protein. They will equally share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry's 10 million Swedish krona (approximately US$1.4 million).
Subsequently, Chairman of the Chemistry Prize Selection Committee Gunnar von Heine and judge Moens Ellenberry introduced the achievements of the three winners respectively. They said that green fluorescent protein is an important tool for studying contemporary biology. With the help of this "guidepost", scientists have developed methods to monitor the growth process of brain nerve cells, which were not possible before.
They said that Osamu Shimomura first discovered a protein that fluoresces green under ultraviolet light, namely green fluorescent protein, in jellyfish on the west coast of North America in 1962. Subsequently, Martin Schalfi made contributions to the use of green fluorescent protein as biological tracer molecules; Qian Yongjian allowed the scientific community to more comprehensively understand the luminescence mechanism of green fluorescent protein, and he also expanded the scope of fluorescence in other colors besides green. Proteins lay the foundation for research on tracking changes in multiple biological cells at the same time.
At the press conference, Urquist called Qian Yongjian’s phone to congratulate him. When answering a question from a reporter from Xinhua News Agency, Qian Yongjian said that winning the Nobel Prize by a Chinese scientist will make the Chinese people feel proud and proud, and it can also inspire more Chinese young people to devote themselves to scientific research. Qian Yongjian also told the media present that he was very happy to be this year's winner. Although there were rumors before, this was indeed unexpected.
Qian Yongjian’s research history
Has “the most beautiful brain in the world”
On the eve of the announcement of the winners, Qian Yongjian was told on the phone that he Won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and was invited to attend the award ceremony to be held in Stockholm in December. This is undoubtedly the most important award that Qian Yongjian has received so far.
Previously, Qian Yongjian has received numerous "golden" professional awards, including the Wolf Prize in Medicine, known as the "Nobel Pointer", in 2004. In addition, he holds no fewer than 60 U.S. patented inventions.
With his talents in chemistry and biology, Qian Yongjian found a way to make green fluorescent proteins glow brighter and longer, and created a wider range of fluorescent protein colors, including yellow, blue, and orange. Wait for color. "I have always been attracted by color," Qian Yongjian said. It is color that makes his work more interesting. "When the work is not going well, because of color, I can continue the work. If I am born with Being colorblind, I probably wouldn’t have achieved what I have achieved today.”
Qian Yongjian’s talent and achievements are recognized by people in the industry. Mark Ellison, a long-term collaborator of Qian Yongjian and director of the National Center for Microscopy Imaging and Research at the University of California, San Diego, said that Qian Yongjian is the smartest person he has ever met.
He commented on Qian Yongjian in an interview with the "San Diego Union-Tribune": "He has the most beautiful brain in the world, not only because he can think deeply about how to fill the gaps in the known scientific fields. , more because he knows how to discover new problems. He digs deeply, understands problems quickly, and is good at uniting all parts of the problem and discovering new research tools to help other scientists discover other new problems. "
In this regard, Qian Yongjian humbly emphasized that he was not the discoverer of fluorescent proteins, "I am just a person who makes tools."
After several "turns", he finally returned Chemistry
Qian Yongjian was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his achievements in fluorescent protein research. In fact, despite his wide range of interests, he did not choose this path from the beginning.
Qian Yongjian is a person with a wide range of interests. Because of his asthma, he could only stay at home when he was a child. Because of his interest in chemistry, he set up his own "little chemistry laboratory" in the basement of his home and played with bottles and cans. At the age of 16, Qian Yongjian also won the Westinghouse Scientific Genius Award. At that time, he was studying how to melt metals into thiocyanate. The "Westinghouse Scientific Genius Award" is the oldest and most prestigious science competition in the United States, and the winners are often regarded as "little Nobel laureates." Afterwards, he entered Harvard University through a Westinghouse scholarship.
Despite his excellent grades, Qian Yongjian also had moments when he got tired of chemistry. When he was studying at Harvard University, he was quite dissatisfied with the rigid curriculum, so he took a lot of piano lessons.
While continuing his studies at Cambridge University, he wanted to do something more interesting, so he switched from chemistry to molecular biology and then to oceanography. "I always had some dream about sailing on the blue sea, but it turned out that my work had nothing to do with this dream. My research included measuring oil pollution in the bay. In the end, I finally understood that I didn't care about the Algae Sea at all. "The problem of depth."
So Qian Yongjian switched from oceanography to physiology and obtained a doctorate. At that time, his research mainly focused on the human brain, which was more interesting to him.
In Qian Yongjian’s view, the human brain is an intoxicating loom. “It requires more skillful, sophisticated and creative methods to weave the fragments together.” After that, he "returned" to chemistry and began his research on green fluorescent protein.
Confident in his own cancer research
Jenifer, director of organelle biology at the National Institute of Early Childhood Health and Human Development, said: "Qian Yongjian has a huge impact. He demonstrated a series of possible applications of green fluorescent protein-based reactants and facilitated their use in the biological community. Dr. Qian played a crucial impact on the development of cell biology."
Green fluorescent protein is currently receiving more and more attention from the scientific community. Before 1992, there were very few scientific research articles on green fluorescent protein, but last year alone, according to statistics, there were 12,000 scientific research articles related to green fluorescent protein or fluorescent proteins. Some scientists predict that this number will continue to grow.
Qian Yongjian is particularly interested in whether fluorescent proteins can be used in neurobiology and cancer. His father died of cancer. "He had pancreatic cancer, and he left us 6 months after he was diagnosed."
Although Qian Yongjian has made revolutionary contributions in the field of fluorescent protein research, he has planned to bring this type of He left the work to his colleagues and devoted more time and energy to researching human conditions, including conquering diseases such as cancer, atherosclerosis, and stroke.
Qian Yongjian admitted that his research on cancer may not yield any results. "The history of science is full of examples of scientists who succeeded in one study but failed in another."
However, Qian Yongjian is still confident in his research because Animal experiments have shown that the research is promising.
Life
Qian Yongjian was born in New York, USA in 1952. His father was a mechanical engineer, and his uncles were engineering professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Qian Yongjian showed scientific talent in his childhood.
Due to asthma as a child, Qian Yongjian had to avoid outdoor exercise as much as possible. He often spent hours doing chemical experiments in his underground laboratory. He was fascinated by the bright colors produced by his experiments.
At the age of 16, Qian Yongjian won first prize in the U.S. national award "Westinghouse Scientific Talent Selection" for an investigation project on metals susceptible to corrosion by thiocyanate. This competition, now known as the "Intel Science Talent Competition," is the oldest and most prestigious science competition in the United States. The contestants are mainly high school students. It is also known as the "Young Nobel Prize."
Qian Yongjian received a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics from Harvard University in 1972, when he was 20 years old.
Organic Dyes
While a graduate student at the University of Cambridge in England, Qian Yongjian invented a better dye that could track calcium levels in cells.
Calcium plays a key role in a variety of physiological reactions, including nerve impulse regulation, muscle contraction, fertilization, etc. However, methods for measuring intracellular calcium levels were primitive at the time and required injecting calcium-binding protein through the cell wall, a method that often destroyed the cells being studied.
Qian Yongjian used chemical technology to invent organic dyes that dramatically change fluorescence when combined with calcium.
In addition, Qian Yongjian also found a way to "paint" calcium so that the dye can penetrate the cell wall without injection.
The legend of the Qian family
Qian Yongjian’s father, Qian Xueju, and Qian Xuesen are cousins. Both graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and went to study in the United States. Qian Yongjian has great respect for Qian Xuesen, the elder of the family. In an interview with the Journal of Cell Biology last year, he specifically mentioned that there were many engineers in his mother's and father's families, among whom Qian Xuesen was the head of China's atomic bomb project.
Qian Yongjian was born in New York in 1952. Perhaps because of his family background, he became interested in science since he was a child. When he was in elementary school, his parents bought him chemistry experiment toys, but he found them unsatisfactory. Later, Qian Yongjian found a chemistry book in the school library that talked about how to turn a purple solution into green, and he was deeply attracted by chemistry. When he was in high school, his basement was filled with bottles and cans. The brothers even secretly made gunpowder, which accidentally caught fire and burned the table tennis table. Despite the accident, parents did not stop their children's chemistry experiments, and Qian Yongjian simply moved the experiment location to an outdoor concrete terrace.
At the age of 16, Qian Yongjian won the Westinghouse Science Award specially established for middle school students for a chemistry project funded by the National Science Foundation. However, when Qian Yongjian was a student at Harvard University, he did not like the chemistry teaching method at that time, and his interest began to shift to neuroscience. Later, he received a scholarship to study for a doctoral degree at the University of Cambridge in England, and his assigned supervisor was Richard Adrian.
At that time, Qian Yongjian’s eldest brother Qian Yongyou (Richard Tsien) happened to return from Oxford, England. Qian Yongyou later worked at Stanford University and, like Qian Yongjian, became an academician of the National Academy of Sciences. Qian Yongyou told his brother that Adrian was an electrophysiologist who studied muscles. Qian Yongjian was stunned because what he wanted to study at that time was the brain.
However, Adrian gave Qian Yongjian great freedom, and Qian Yongjian began to study how to observe the brain's neural signal network. In 1980, Qian Yongjian invented a dye molecule to detect calcium ion concentration. Calcium ions are important signaling molecules in living organisms. Therefore, Qian Yongjian's invention is widely used in in vivo imaging technology. For a long time, biologists ignored the chemistry of calcium ions, and chemists did not understand the biological significance of calcium ion signals. Qian Yongjian, who has a background in both chemistry and biology, achieved something after many failures.
Two years later, Qian Yongjian married the beautiful girl Wendy (Wendy Globe).