Gene's Discoverer Left Out Of Nobel Prize
I don't know how many of you stumbled on this NPR news item which even NPR stumbled upon. So the Nobel prize for chemistry for 2008 was yesterday awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, Roger Y. Tsien for their research on this.
But Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien owe a huge amount of credit to their research work to one Douglas Prasher who was the first to clone the gene for GFP. He had the idea that this could be used as a tag for other proteins, but was never able to get to the point of demonstrating it, and will join the list of people who were on the trail of a Nobel discovery but never quite got there. The reason, the government cut the funding to his research. Prasher furnished some of the clone to Martin Chalfie at Columbia, who got it to express in E. coli and found that the bacteria indeed glowed bright green. Where Roger Tsien enters the picture is in extending this idea to a whole family of proteins. Tsien worked out the last details of the fluorescent structure, showing that oxygen is needed for the last step. Tsien got the clone from Douglas Prasher too. No way to know whether Douglas Prasher would have made the same progress as these guys did. But the original idea was his and with funding maybe he would got there too. Whatever it is, today Douglas Prasher drives a shuttle bus for an auto dealership. And is struggling to even make a healthy living for his family.
Which brings me to my point that so much of what you achieve in life is not what you are able to do but what you are enabled to do.
Listen to the story here.
But Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien owe a huge amount of credit to their research work to one Douglas Prasher who was the first to clone the gene for GFP. He had the idea that this could be used as a tag for other proteins, but was never able to get to the point of demonstrating it, and will join the list of people who were on the trail of a Nobel discovery but never quite got there. The reason, the government cut the funding to his research. Prasher furnished some of the clone to Martin Chalfie at Columbia, who got it to express in E. coli and found that the bacteria indeed glowed bright green. Where Roger Tsien enters the picture is in extending this idea to a whole family of proteins. Tsien worked out the last details of the fluorescent structure, showing that oxygen is needed for the last step. Tsien got the clone from Douglas Prasher too. No way to know whether Douglas Prasher would have made the same progress as these guys did. But the original idea was his and with funding maybe he would got there too. Whatever it is, today Douglas Prasher drives a shuttle bus for an auto dealership. And is struggling to even make a healthy living for his family.
Which brings me to my point that so much of what you achieve in life is not what you are able to do but what you are enabled to do.
Listen to the story here.