- Person
- Martin Chalfie
- Lived
- b. 1947
- Field
- Neurobiology
- From
- American
The story
The jellyfish Aequorea victoria, which drifts off the west coast of North America, contains a protein that glows bright green under blue or ultraviolet light. Osamu Shimomura isolated it in 1962, and for decades the green fluorescent protein, GFP, was a scientific curiosity.
Martin Chalfie, a biologist at Columbia University and the grandson of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, heard about GFP at a seminar in the late 1980s and saw a possibility no one had tried. He studied the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, which is transparent. If the GFP gene could be joined to a worm gene, he reasoned, cells using that gene would glow, revealing in a living animal where and when a gene is switched on.
Douglas Prasher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution had just cloned the GFP gene and sent Chalfie a copy. Chalfie’s team, including graduate student Ghia Euskirchen, showed that bacteria carrying the gene glowed green, proving that GFP needs no other jellyfish ingredient to shine. In 1994 they reported in the journal Science that GFP worked as a marker of gene activity in bacteria and in worms, where it lit up six individual touch-sensing nerve cells.
The result transformed biology. Scientists could now attach GFP to almost any protein and follow it inside living cells, or label whole cells and watch them grow, move and die. The Nobel committee, awarding the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Shimomura, Chalfie and Roger Tsien, called GFP one of the most important tools in contemporary bioscience, used to watch nerve cells develop in the brain, follow how cancer cells spread, study nerve damage in Alzheimer’s disease and see how insulin-producing cells form.
Chalfie also made sure the overlooked Prasher was honoured: he and Tsien invited Prasher, who had left science and was driving a courtesy van in Alabama, to attend the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm as their guest.
Why it matters
GFP lets researchers worldwide watch genes, proteins and cells in living organisms, speeding research on cancer, brain disease, infection and development.
About Martin Chalfie
Chicago-born biologist who showed that a jellyfish’s green glowing protein could light up genes inside living animals, now a standard tool for studying cancer, the brain and disease. Nobel Prize 2008.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 NobelPrize.org
- Martin Chalfie, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Alabama van driver headed to Nobel ceremony NBC News (Associated Press)
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.