A UC San Diego pharmacologist and two other U.S.-based scientists won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their development of a green fluorescent protein from jellyfish that has provided researchers their first new window into the workings of the cell since the development of the microscope.
Roger Y. Tsien, 56, of UC San Diego; Martin Chalfie, 61, of Columbia University; and Osamu Shimomura, 80, a Japanese-born researcher who works at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., will share the $1.4-million prize for developing the protein that the Nobel committee called "a guiding star for biochemists, biologists, medical scientists and other researchers."
The protein can be attached to any of the 10,000 individual molecules within a living cell, allowing researchers for the first time to trace their paths as they wind through the complex pathways of life.
It is "an essential piece of the scientific toolbox," said Jeremy M. Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which has funded work by all three scientists. "It is impossible to overstate the impact of these investigators' work on scientific progress."
In a hastily arranged news conference Wednesday morning, Chalfie said he had slept through early morning phone calls from Sweden and did not know about the prize until he woke up and checked his laptop.
"It's not something out of the blue, but you never know when it's going to come or if it's going to come, so it's always a big surprise when it actually happens," he said.
Shimomura told the Japanese broadcaster NHK that he was surprised to receive the chemistry Nobel "because I was rumored as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine."
In a telephone news conference, Tsien said he felt "a bit like a deer caught in the headlights. . . . Fundamentally, I'm no smarter today than I was yesterday."
The story of the fluorescent protein starts with Shimomura. In 1953, he was hired as an assistant in the Nagoya University laboratory of biologist Yoshimasa Hirata, who assigned him to discover what made the remains of a crushed mollusk glow when it was moistened with sea water.
Hirata had considered the project so difficult that he would not assign it to a graduate student for fear that its failure would prevent him from receiving his degree. But within three years, Shimomura had isolated the protein.
