Tony Pawson: In Memoriam

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 proteinprotein 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 Sadowski 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). Tony subsequently demonstrated that these SH2 domains bound with high affinity to select phosphotyrosine-containing motifs in their target proteins, the first report being a landmark paper published in 1990 (Anderson et al., 1990). These crucial findings were rapidly confirmed and expanded upon by Tony’s group and many other laboratories in the 1990s. The biological significance of the SH2 domain in neurobiology was first uncovered by Tony utilizing the power of Drosophila genetics. Here, graduate student Paul Olivier