From left Nobel Chemistry laureates Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose talks to the media during the press conference at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, December 7, 2004. [Photo/IC]

Rose was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 16, 1926, and spent much of his career as a researcher at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. His Nobel-winning work was done there in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

He joined UC Irvine as a researcher after retiring to Laguna Beach in Southern California in 1997 and continued to work regularly in a campus lab and to publish research papers, the university said.

Rose's intelligence and knowledge were "in the stratosphere compared to the rest of us in the field," and he was always willing to provide hands-on help to students and researchers struggling with experiments, Ralph Bradshaw, a longtime friend of Rose's and a UC Irvine professor emeritus of physiology & biophysics, told the school.

On the day that Rose was announced as a co-winner of the Nobel, "he tucked two test tubes in his shirt pocket and that night quietly slipped into a building named after another UCI Nobel laureate, Frederick Reines, where he used the university's powerful mass spectrometry facility to analyze the contents," the university statement said.

Rose was "never content to bask in the glory of his accomplishments and always eager to continue making new discoveries," chemistry professor James Nowick said in the statement.