Foreword to the New Edition

Figure 1

Edmond H. Fischer

Edmond Fischer was born in Shanghai, China, on 6 April 1920. He carried out all his studies in Switzerland, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry at the University of Geneva. After spending a year at the California Institute of Technology, he joined the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is now Professor Emeritus. It was in Seattle that he initiated his collaborative studies with Edwin G. Krebs on the regulation of cellular processes by reversible protein phosphorylation. In recent years, Dr. Fischer has been particularly interested in the role played by cytoplasmic and receptor protein tyrosine phosphatases in signal transduction and cell transformation. He has served on various Scientific Advisory Boards and is on the Board of Scientific Governors of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and of the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Rehovot, Israel. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and of several science academies abroad and was awarded honorary degrees from a number of U.S. and international universities. In 1992, he and Edwin G. Krebs were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism.