LOS ANGELES -- Irwin A. "Ernie" Rose, the 78-year-old co-winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry Wednesday, did something unusual after his retirement; he went back to the lab.

Already eminent, he could have entered a cozy life reviewing science articles and appearing at conferences. Instead, he joined the University of California, Irvine, as an emeritus researcher in the College of Medicine. Armed with a small grant and a little laboratory space, he continues to conduct experiments and publish research.

"We would see him come in every morning. He would come in in shorts and sandals and T-shirt and work at the bench," said Stuart Arfin, a professor emeritus and former UCI biochemistry chairman.

In a telephone conference from UCI, Rose said his work remains his hobby.

"If you enjoy what you work on, if it gives you satisfaction, why should you try to behave like other people?" he said. "Why don't you do exactly what you want to do and be happy?"

He has a laboratory at his house so he can work in the middle of the night when inspiration hits.

"I try to get a little sleep but otherwise I don't have what you'd call a normal life," Rose said.

Rose and two Israeli scientists shared the Nobel Prize for work they did in the 1980s. They discovered a process that gives doomed proteins a chemical label and then chops them up inside cells.

The process is important to the immune system and governs such key tasks as cell division and DNA repair. Cervical cancer and other diseases can result if it goes wrong. Understanding the process has led to development of a new drug for treating bone marrow cancer.

At the time, however, "nobody had a clue" about the chemical process involved, Rose said.

"I realized this was an important problem and few other people in the world were working on it."

Rose said he made a "relatively minor" contribution to the research that was started by co-winner Avram Hershko (the third recipient is Aaron Ciechanover).

Rose rejected the suggestion that the Nobel validates his career.

"Ha! That's ridiculous," he said. "Science is not that way.

"You work and if you find results that are important, that's nice. If you find results that are correct, that's even nicer. And if you're satisfied in your work and you can influence other people in the effort to do good science, that's important."

Rose was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in Spokane, Wash. At 15, he was already hooked on biochemistry, in part because the biochemical journal, which he got from the local library, was small enough to be read easily.

He earned his doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Chicago.

He was on the biochemistry department faculty at Yale from 1954 to 1963, when he joined the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. In 1979, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

He remained a senior member of the Fox Chase division of basic science until retiring in 1995. Two years later, he became an emeritus researcher at UCI.

"He was already extremely well-known," Arfin said. "When I was a graduate student in the mid- to late 60s, I knew his name as a leader in the field."

Rose's Nobel is "incredibly well-deserved," Arfin said. "The guy almost from day one made important contributions."

Acquaintances describe Rose as a modest man who loves to discuss science _ so much so that sometimes they playfully wish he would talk about the weather instead.

Unlike the industrial-scale researcher that often is practiced in the sciences these days, Rose works by himself or with a handful of colleagues, although he communicates with other labs around the world.

"I'm still operating as an individual. I'm sort of like Gary Cooper in one of these plays where he's following his own star," he said.

"I'm really happy for him. I think it's incredibly richly deserved," said Cecile Pickart, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

She was a postdoctoral student who worked with Rose from 1982 to 1985 at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

Rose is "a very wonderful person, a very warm individual, loyal, funny and very smart," she said.

He also encouraged creativity in his students, she said, and had a genius for being able to see the ramifications of research.

"He was more of a brainstormer. He was always thinking about science, even when you didn't want to be thinking about science," she joked. "There was this constant sort of barrage of ideas coming from him."

Rose's wife of 49 years, Zelda Budenstein Rose, also is a biochemist and peace activist who at one time worked for nuclear disarmament. They live in Laguna Woods in the Leisure World retirement community not far from the beach in Orange County.

They have a daughter and son in Seattle and twin boys in Massachusetts and Raleigh, N.C.

The North Carolina son is an X-ray crystallographer working on diabetes research.

"He's my contribution to the future of science in the real sense," Rose said.

Rose said his telephone has been busy with calls since the news from Sweden arrived at 2 a.m. _ so much so that he had been unable to contact his four children.

The recognition, however, will make it easier for him to carry out experiments "anywhere in the world."

"I'm sure that with all this attention, people expect me to be wiser than I am," he said.

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