We lost a star scientist this summer, Tony Pawson, who made incredible contributions in his shortened career to our understanding of the biochemical mechanisms of cell signaling. Tony, a Canadian of British origin, performed groundbreaking research spanning nearly 40 years that provided tremendous insight into how biochemical signals communicate information both between and inside cells. He was the first to recognize that the transduction of these biochemical signals often involve strong noncovalent protein-protein interactions formed by highly conserved noncatalytic domain segments of signaling molecules, the prototype being the Src homology 2 "SH2" domain that he and graduate student Ivan Sado-wski first coined back in the 1980s during early work on the oncogenic v-fps protein encoded by the Fujinami sarcoma virus (Sadowski et al., 1986).
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