Cecile Pickart 1954–2006

When an unusually gifted scientist passes away prematurely, and when her friendship was so widely treasured , the intensity of sadness is difficult to convey. Cecile Pickart shaped the ubiquitin field for over two decades with equal parts creativity, rigor, and fairness (see photo). Her finest work centered on the polyubiquitin chain, the primary signal for protein degradation by the proteasome. With consummate ingenuity, she explored the idea that the structure of the chain constituted a detailed code specifying the fate of the target protein. Cecile was born in 1954 in Maryland and was raised in a family of seven children, in the town of Setauket, New York, and later in Brookeville, Mary-land. She died in Baltimore on April 5th, 2006 of kidney cancer. She had struggled against the disease for over 4 years, and despite her worsening condition, she continued to direct her research group, and even to conduct her own experiments, until two weeks before her death. Cecile received her B.S. summa cum laude in 1976. She then trained with William Jencks at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, earning her Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1982. After post-doctoral studies with Irwin A. Rose at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where she first worked on ubiquitin, she joined the Department of Biochemistry at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. She was to spend the next ten years there. In 1995, she was appointed Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at The Johns Hopkins University where she continued her groundbreaking studies on the ubiquitin system. The ubiquitin system enchanted Cecile—she once described it as infinitely seductive. Indeed, after joining Irwin Rose's laboratory as a post-doctoral fellow, she never seriously considered another area of study. 1982 was a good year for Cecile to begin working on ubiquitin with Irwin Rose. During this time period, Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciech-anover visited Rose frequently (their collaboration on the enzymology of ubiquitination resulted in the award of the 2004 Chemistry Nobel prize). As is often the case, the importance of this work was recognized only in retrospect, and for a junior scientist such as Cecile to dedicate her career to a little known protein modification was in those days a risky call. Although the enzymes involved in the ubiquitin pathway were new and mysterious, Cecile began to describe these enzymes to the world as though she had obtained the answer …