Tony Pawson (1952–2013)

Tony Pawson Tony Pawson, a world-renowned scientist and a pioneer who made groundbreaking contributions that shaped our current understanding of how cellular signal transduction pathways are regulated in normal tissues and in cancer cells, sadly passed away on August 7, 2013 at the age of 60. Anthony James Pawson was born on October 18, 1952 in Maidstone in the County of Kent in England. His mother was a high school biology teacher with a special interest in botany. His father was a well-known soccer player who played for the Oxford University team and for the English soccer team at the 1952Olympiad in Helsinki. His father was also a successful cricket player, a member of the English fly-fishing team for the 1989 world championship, and, later in life, an author and correspondent for the Observer. Tony mentioned that he obtained his interest in science and the natural world from his mother, but his passion for writing, his competitiveness, his determination, and his own love of fly fishing from his father. After spending his school years at Winchester College, Tony received his undergraduate education as a member of Clare College at Cambridge University. In Cambridge, he became interested in biochemistry and had the opportunity to spend time in the laboratory performing experiments in the field of protein synthesis. In 1973, Tonymoved to London for his Ph.D. degree at ICRF (Imperial Cancer Research Fund, which is now called Cancer Research UK) with Alan Smith. During Tony’s Ph.D. studies, the focus of his research was the mode of action and mechanism of oncogenesis mediated by retroviruses and how retroviruses propagate themselves. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1976, Tony crossed the Atlantic and worked at the laboratory of Steven Martin at the University of California, Berkeley. Martin focused on investigating themechanism of action of Rous Sarcoma virus, a retrovirus that causes tumors in chickens and transforms cultured cells by expressing its oncogenic protein, v-Src. During his postdoctoral training, Tony started to