Sir Philip Cohen, a biochemist elected as a foreign associate to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, remembers the moment in his distinguished career when his studies in cell signaling and protein phosphorylation took off. The moment arrived during a 1978 seminar given by Thomas Vanaman at the University of Dundee (Dundee, Scotland, UK). At that time, Cohen had been working on the first kinase to be studied, phosphorylase kinase, which helps to regulate the breakdown of glycogen. Cohen had purified the kinase to study how it was regulated by cAMP and calcium, but he could not untangle the mechanisms by which calcium activated it. That afternoon, Vanaman spoke about work he had done on calmodulin, a calcium-binding protein and a known intermediary in calcium-regulated processes.
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