Jellyfish in San Juans led scientists to Nobel Prize

Three U.S.-based scientists won a Nobel Prize on 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, 80, a Japanese citizen who works in the United States, and Americans Martin Chalfie, 61, and Roger Tsien, 56, shared the chemistry 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 particular genes turn on and off.

Researchers worldwide now use GFP to track development of brain cells, the growth of tumors and the spread of cancer cells. It has enabled them to 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 enable scientists follow multiple cells or proteins simultaneously.

"This is a technology that has literally transformed medical research," said Dr. 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."

Last year, in what the Nobel citation called a "spectacular experiment," Harvard researchers said that they had tagged brain cells in mice with some 90 colors. The technique is called "Brainbow."

GFP was 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 summer 1961, he and a colleague processed tissue from about 10,000 jellyfish they'd collected near Friday Harbor, Wash., on San Juan Island. The next year, they reported the finding of GFP.

Some 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 said.

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

The three will split the $1.4 million award.

Chalfie said he slept through the Nobel committee's phone calls early Wednesday because he'd accidentally adjusted his telephone to ring very softly. He woke up and thought the soft ring was coming from a neighboring apartment.

"I was a little bit annoyed that they weren't answering their phone," he said. "I then realized because it was after 6, that they must have announced the Nobel Prize in chemistry. I decided to find out who the schnook was that won it this year. So I opened up my laptop and found out I was the schnook."

Shimomura said he was surprised.

"My accomplishment was just the discovery of a protein. ... But I am happy," he said.

Tsien thanked scientists worldwide. When they do "good things with GFP and its progeny," Tsien said he can "bask in the warmth of that glow a little bit, too."

Gunnar von Heijne, the chairman of the chemistry prize committee, demonstrated the award-winning research to reporters by shining ultraviolet light on a tube with E. coli bacteria containing GFP. The tube glowed green.

The awards include the money, a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Information from The New York Times is included in this report.