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Unlabelled: The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB; http://www.iscb.org) honors a senior scientist annually for his or her outstanding achievements with the ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award. This award recognizes a leader in the field of computational biology for his or her significant contributions to the community through research, service and education. Cyrus Chothia, an emeritus scientist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology and emeritus fellow of Wolfson College at Cambridge University, England, is the 2015 ISCB Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award winner.Chothia was selected by the Awards Committee, which is chaired by Dr Bonnie Berger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will receive his award and deliver a keynote presentation at 2015 Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology/European Conference on Computational Biology in Dublin, Ireland, in July 2015., Contact: dkovats@iscb.org., (© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

The 2012 Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award in Medical Science will be shared by Donald Brown and Tom Maniatis for their scientific work leading to the purification and study of single genes by physical and molecular biological methodologies. Brown and Maniatis are also recognized for their extraordinary commitment and generosity in promoting the careers of young scientists. The impact of these accomplishments has transformed biological and medical science over the past four decades., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

George Palade, a founding father of cell biology and of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), established the ultrastructural framework for an analysis of how proteins are secreted and membranes are assembled in eukaryotic cells. His vision inspired a generation of investigators to probe the molecular mechanisms of protein transport. My laboratory has dissected these pathways with complementary genetic and biochemical approaches. Peter Novick, one of my first graduate students, isolated secretion mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and through cytological analysis of single and double mutants and molecular cloning of the corresponding SEC genes, we established that yeast cells use a secretory pathway fundamentally conserved in all eukaryotes. A biochemical reaction that recapitulates the first half of the secretory pathway was used to characterize Sec proteins that comprise the polypeptide translocation channel in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane (Sec61) and the cytoplasmic coat protein complex (COPII) that captures cargo proteins into transport vesicles that bud from the ER.

This essay looks backward on the past three decades of research toward understanding the mechanism of macromolecular traffic through and within the Golgi apparatus with an eye to the future. I also explain why I feel the Golgi should continue to hold the attention of molecular cell biologists.

I describe my wanderings from the United States to East Germany and back. I hope this gives a glimpse of science in East Germany and encourages people who do science under less than favorable conditions. Although elements of my story are unique, the main points are general: don't be afraid to start something new; it pays to be persistent; and science is a passion--if it feels like fun, you've probably got it right.

This year, the Lasker Foundation recognizes Victor Ambros, Gary Ruvkun, and David Baulcombe for their pioneering work elucidating the role of short RNA species in the posttranscriptional regulation of eukaryotic gene expression.