Martin Chalfie received his Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard in 1977, joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University in 1982, and last spring was named University Professor, Columbia’s highest honor, a title held by only thirteen of Columbia’s faculty. Because Alfred Nobel in his will left money for prizes in only five categories — peace, literature, physics, chemistry, and “physiology or medicine” — biologists who make revolutionary discoveries receive the prize in one of the last two categories, and Prof. Chalfie shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of GFP: Green Fluorescent Protein. In its announcement of the award, his department said, “GFP has become a fundamental tool of cell biology, developmental biology, genetics, neurobiology, and the medical sciences.” Prof. Chalfie writes of his talk, “Yogi Berra once said, ‘You can observe a lot by just watching.’ Unfortunately, before the early 1990’s observations in the biological sciences were usually done on dead specimens that were specially prepared and permeabilized to allow entry of reagents to stain cell components. Those methods allowed a glimpse of what cells were doing, but they gave a necessarily static view of life, just snapshots in time. GFP and other fluorescent proteins revolutionized the biological sciences because these proteins allowed scientists to look at the inner working of living cells. GFP can be used to tell where genes are turned on, where proteins are located within tissues, and how cell activities change over time. Once a cell can be seen, it can be studied and manipulated. The story of the discovery and development of GFP also provides a very nice example of how scientific progress is often made: through accidental discoveries, the willingness to ignore previous assumptions and take chances, and the combined efforts of many people. The story of GFP also shows the importance of basic research on non-traditional organisms.”
