Can you remember the best scientific talk you’ve ever attended? Of the hundreds that most of us have witnessed, a few are pretty bad, most are adequate, and a handful might be good enough to linger on in the memory for years. If I had to pick one, it would be a talk I attended in the midst of my graduate training, ca. 1990-1991. It was a not very well attended talk by Alexander Varshavsky, delivered at the New York Blood Center on the upper east side of Manhattan. Varshavsky and his colleagues were then in the midst of a remarkable string of discoveries on the role of ubiquitin in proteolysis (the N-end rule pathway etc.), some of which I’m sure I was familiar with on that afternoon, but by no means all. The hour-long talk that Varshavsky gave was just about perfect—organized, crystal-clear, eloquent, confident, witty. It seemed to have been meticulously thought out beforehand, although it was offered up so effortlessly that it simultaneously gave the impression of being delivered off the top of his head (if you’ve ever heard Stephen Jay Gould talk, Varshavsky has a similar impact). The data themselves were beautiful and, amazingly, defined an entire field of cellular physiology that had been overlooked.

I bring this up because Varshavsky has just been awarded the 2006 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. He received the award “for explaining how ubiquitin, a protein found in the cells of all living things from yeast to human beings, regulates many crucial biological functions. He has been credited by his peers with co-founding the field of ubiquitin research and ushering it into the age of molecular genetics”. Not that he needs the recognition, having a long list of awards on his CV already (although not the Nobel, which left him out when Hershover, Ciechanover, and Rose were justly tapped in 2004). It’s pointless to carp about the Nobel, of course, which is bound by a quirky set of rules, but let’s just say that this was a missed opportunity (the letter to Science by Baumeister et al. in this regard is so subtle as to be funny). Anyway, it’s always good to see excellent work rewarded.

Some more evidence of Varshavsky’s thoughtfulness can be found in this interview in the July 1, 2003 issue of Current Biology, which displays his wit, good sense, and broad education. He even has my favorite introduction to that most forgettable of formats, the lab website:

We are interested in just about everything. But the brevity of life being what it is compels selectivity.