It is with great sadness that we report the death of Edgar da Cruz e Silva on March 2nd 2010 after a long battle against cancer. Edgar, who worked in the Protein Phosphorylation Group from 1983-1988, just before it became the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit, was Tricia Cohen's first Ph.D. student. He was the first person to carry out cDNA cloning using oligonucleotide screening at the University of Dundee, which he exploited to determine the sequence of the catalytic subunit of phosphorylase kinase. The cDNA libraries that he made were also used to isolate the first clones of protein phosphatase 1 and, with his wife Odete (also a Ph.D. student in Tricia's group), the first clones of protein phosphatase 4. After a year as a postdoc in Tricia's lab, Edgar then spent eight years carrying out postdoctoral research on protein phosphatases at the Rockefeller University, New York with Paul Greengard, who received a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on dopamine signaling in the brain. Edgar and Odete moved to the University of Aveiro in Portugal in 1996, where they became founder members of the Centre for Cellular Biology. Over the next 14 years Edgar, who was appointed Professor and later the Director of the Centre, did much to build up strength in biology in Aveiro that put it on the scientific map. Tricia and Philip Cohen visited the Department on several occasions and, with Carol MacKintosh, attended the Europhosphatase 2007 conference in Aveiro, which Edgar organised and ran superbly, despite having been diagnosed with cancer a year before it took place. Edgar was a warm and generous person, and a committed and talented scientist, who will be sadly missed by the cell signaling community. The Unit sends its sincerest condolences to Odete and their two children CristÃÂ_vão and David.