Alex Palazzo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at The University of Toronto.
Over the past two days, many have pointed out that the one person left out of the Nobel Prize was Douglas Prasher, researcher who cloned GFP from jellyfish, Aequorea victoria. Sadly, Prasher lost his funding and his lab just after he performed the ground work that led to Chalfie and (some of) Tsien's Nobel Prize winning work. It turns out that NPR recently found Prasher - he's now driving a bus in Huntsville, Alabama. Listen to the interview here. As one former colleague states, his case is an example of "a staggering waste of talent".
(ht: Abel)
For more on GFP, visit Marc Zimmer's History of GFP page.
Education & Careers
Comments
you don't get nobel prizes for simply cloning a gene.
Posted by: randy | October 9, 2008 8:04 PM
Jesus. That's an awful story. The other winners should pitch in and provide some financial help. It's the least they could do. And "randy"? You're an ass and you should learn to use the shift key.
Posted by: George Smiley | October 9, 2008 11:10 PM
It may be easy to clone genes now, but back then before the time when genomes were available it was not such an easy task. But conceptualy, Prasher had it all - he wanted to use GFP as a biomarker (like Chalfie did in his Science paper) and he wanted to fuse GFP to a protein (just like every one does today). The ideas were all there, but not the cash.
So yeah, it's a big deal.
Posted by: Alex Palazzo | October 10, 2008 8:46 AM
Note, also, that Prasher was anchor author on the Chalfie et al. Science paper.
Posted by: George Smiley | October 10, 2008 10:43 AM
Buck and Axel did--well, a gene family--and deservedly so.
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | October 11, 2008 5:49 PM
Just some naive questions: does anybody know why Dr. Prasher was unable to get further funding?
Was there skepticism at that time about the utilization of GFP as a biomarker or as part of a fusion protein?
Did study sections crow about potential toxicities with GFP expression?
I wonder what would have happened if Dr. Prasher had known Chalfie and Tsien a year or two before his money ran out and they collaborated on a group grant....
Posted by: Ed | October 11, 2008 11:28 PM