In December 2008 Douglas Prasher took a week off from his job driving a courtesy van at the Penney Toyota car dealership in Huntsville, Alabama, to attend the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm. It was the first vacation he and his wife, Gina, had taken in years. On the day of the awards, he donned a rented copy of the penguin suit that all male Nobel attendees are required to wear, along with a pair of leather shoes that a Huntsville store had let him borrow.
At the Nobel banquet, sitting beneath glittering chandeliers suspended from a seven-story ceiling, Prasher got his first sip of a dessert wine that he had dreamed of tasting for 30 years. When the waitress was done pouring it into his glass, he asked if she could leave the bottle at the table. She couldn’t, she told him, because the staff planned to finish it later. His buddies back at Penney Toyota were going to love that story, he thought.
Prasher’s trip would have been impossible without the sponsorship of biologist Martin Chalfie and chemist and biologist Roger Tsien, who not only invited the Prashers but paid for their airfare and hotel. Chalfie and Tsien, along with Osama Shimomura, an organic chemist and marine biologist, had won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The three researchers were sharing the $1.4 million award for the development of green fluorescent protein (GFP), a molecule that makes certain jellyfish glow. Starting in the mid-1990s, scientists began using GFP as a tracer for studying biochemical processes. The results were spectacular: The luminous protein made it possible to glimpse the inner workings of cells, tissues, and organs in unprecedented detail.
Had life turned out slightly differently, Prasher could have been attending the ceremony not as a guest but as a laureate. More than two decades earlier, it was Prasher who cloned the gene for GFP while working as a molecular biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The cloning was the first step in using GFP as a tracer chemical in organisms other than jellyfish. Prasher proposed an experiment to see if the GFP gene could make bacteria glow, but he was not able to pull it off. In 1992, when he was about to leave Woods Hole for another science job, he gave the gene to his colleagues Chalfie and Tsien. They went on to perform the experiments that made GFP and its variants into a powerful research tool, the foundation of a multimillion-dollar industry.
Prasher had the vision before anybody else did. But he failed to make it a reality.
