DESCRIPTION

For decades, the attention of the scientific community was focused on the central dogma of biology - the decoding of the genetic information embedded in DNA. Little research was dedicated to how proteins are degraded and removed from cells. Enter onto the scene a young graduate student, Aaron Ciechanover, who is the subject of this interview with Ushma Neill of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Together with his mentor Avram Hershko, Ciechanover uncovered the complex and elegant ubiquitin proteolytic system. For his discovery, Ciechanover shared in the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Hershko and Irwin Rose.

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