[2][1][3] Rose was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a secular Jewish family, the son of Ella (Greenwald) and Harry Royze, who owned a flooring store.

[4] Rose attended Washington State University for one year prior to serving in the Navy during World War II.

[7] He was a distinguished professor-in-residence in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine at the time his Nobel Prize was announced in 2004.

He had a general interest in the role of magnesium in cells, and studied it on the basis of the equilibrium of the reaction catalyzed by adenylate kinase,[15] a complicated question, because numerous complexes of Mg2+, H+ and K+ with ATP, ADP and AMP need to be taken into account.

[19] After its discovery by Gideon Goldstein and colleagues in 1975,[20] ubiquitin was extensively studied by Rose, with Avram Hershko, Aaron Ciechanover, A. L. Haas and H. Heller,[21] one of many papers on the subject.