Irwin A. Rose, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with two collaborators for unraveling the mystery of how cells identify old and damaged proteins and transform them into pieces for new proteins — discoveries that led to the development of a new class of drugs to fight cancer — died on Tuesday in Deerfield, Mass. He was 88.

His son Howard said Dr. Rose died at the home of another son, Frederic, with whom he had been living.

Dr. Rose became fascinated with the problem of protein disposal in the 1950s, when few biochemists shared his enthusiasm. Scientific inquiry was focused then on how things were created — how cells read the blueprints encoded in DNA and use the information to manufacture proteins.

“He was interested in the opposite: How are proteins destroyed?” said Dr. Jonathan Chernoff, the scientific director of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, where Dr. Rose spent most of his career. “There were not very many people working on it,” Dr. Chernoff added in an interview on Tuesday. “I don’t think they particularly considered it an interesting question. But he thought it was an interesting question. And he was right.”