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Roger Tsien shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his "development of the green fluorescent protein (GFP)". Fluorescent proteins revolutionized molecular biology and has contributed to a better understanding of many fields.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, this took place during a visit to Oregon, and other reports mention that he was on a bike trail at the time. Whether this was due to an accident or a sudden medical emergency isn't clear, but what is very clear is that everyone had been expecting to benefit from his work and his insights for some time to come.
Tsien also helped Douglas Prasher, who made substantial contributions that enabled the study of GFP but had to resort to driving a shuttle bus after losing funding because his work was undervalued at the time, by giving Prasher a job in his lab after receiving the Nobel Prize.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/09/01/roger-tsien-1952-2016
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/aug/31/roger-tsien-dies/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Y._Tsien
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Friday September 02 2016, @09:23AM
Accepting your exaggeration, if the community are submitting 3 obituaries a day it suggests to me that enough of our community find the news sufficiently interesting to actually make the effort to submit a story. With the low number of active submitters that we have, this fact alone makes me sit up and take notice.
When the site first began the aim was to specialise in STEM and other loosely related stories that were of interest to our (then) niche community. I would be quite content if it had stayed that way. But our community has changed and their interests have also changed. We get a lot more stories about politics, crime, obituaries, and racial disharmony than we used to get. They are of no interest to me here because they are covered adequately on the TV and elsewhere, but it seems that they are of interest to many in our community - after all, they are submitting them!
There are some who wish the concentration on STEM to be removed. Personally, I hope that it does not happen, but my job is to support this community as best as I can. So I have to give all submitters a chance to be published providing they submit sufficiently good-quality material from which to create a story. I might not be the brightest bulb in the display, but I know enough about topics in which I have some interest to do a passable job of editing them and getting them to the front page. However, having little interest in and knowing nothing about US (or any other) politics, trigger words, transgender issues(?), or whatever else in a similar vein is regularly submitted means that I try very hard not to publish such stories; I might not understand them sufficiently well to do the editing job properly. I am interested in science and technology so I am prepared to give my time willingly to help promote discussion on these subjects.
The contents of these pages depend on you, all of you, so let us know what you think of the content, quality of editing, and the coverage of issues that are of interest to you so that we can ensure that the front page contains something that you want to read. Are you happy with the status quo? If you want a greater breadth of topics, are you able to give up some time to help us edit them? If there are things that you do not want to see (e.g. obituaries!), or at least want to see much less frequently than you do now, let us know that too.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday September 02 2016, @01:49PM
I'm glad someone submitted this, the work he was recognised for has been extremely important for the life sciences - including many medical therapies that could not exist without this diagnostic.
RIP RT, and thanks for the lighting the way...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Friday September 02 2016, @02:12PM
I hope the concentration on STEM remains. I am more likely to read those articles, even if I don't comment.
I think the general topics are good for involving the community in discussions and giving the sense of an active and vibrant site, but the tech stuff is really why I hang out here.
Overall, I think the current mix is pretty good.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.