A Chemistry Nobel for Lighting Up Science

Trio Wins for a Protein That Glows Green

Three U.S.-based scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for turning a glowing green protein from jellyfish into a revolutionary way to watch the tiniest details of life within cells and living creatures.

Osamu Shimomura, a Japanese citizen based in the United States, and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the prize for discovering and developing green fluorescent protein, or GFP.

When exposed to ultraviolet light, the protein glows green. It can act as a marker on otherwise invisible proteins within cells to trace them as they go about their business. It can tag individual cells in tissue. And it can show when and where genes turn on and off.

Researchers worldwide use GFP to track the development of brain cells, the growth of tumors and the spread of cancer cells. It has let them study nerve cell damage from Alzheimer's disease and see how insulin-producing beta cells arise in the pancreas of a growing embryo, for example.

In awarding the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy compared the impact of GFP on science to the invention of the microscope. For the past decade, the academy said, the protein has been "a guiding star" for scientists.

GFP's chemical cousins produce other colors, which let scientists follow multiple cells or proteins simultaneously.

"This is a technology that has literally transformed medical research," said John Frangioni, an associate professor of medicine and radiology at Harvard Medical School. "For the first time, scientists could study both genes and proteins in living cells and in living animals."

GFP was first discovered by Shimomura at Princeton University. He had been seeking the protein that lets a certain kind of jellyfish glow green around its edge. In the summer of 1961, he and a colleague processed tissue from about 10,000 jellyfish they had collected near the island town of Friday Harbor, Wash. The next year, they reported finding GFP.

About 30 years later, Chalfie showed that the GFP gene could make individual nerve cells in a tiny worm glow bright green.

Tsien's work provided GFP-like proteins that extended the scientific palette to a variety of colors. Tsien "really made it a tool that was extremely useful to lots of people," Chalfie told reporters.

Shimomura, 80, now works at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and the Boston University Medical School. Chalfie, 61, is a professor at Columbia University in New York, and Tsien, 56, is a professor at the University of California at San Diego and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The trio will split the $1.4 million award.

Chalfie said he slept through the Nobel committee's phone calls early yesterday because he had accidentally adjusted his telephone to ring very softly. He found out about the prize only when he checked the Nobel Web site to see who had won.