Beaker Hill: Nobel Prize-Winning Edition

Rule #76 of science reporting (and wedding crashing): No excuses. Play like a champion. So we’re jumping right into champions for this week's "Beaker Hill" column.

As reported last night right here, Woods Hole researcher and BU School of Medicine associate professor Osamu Shimomura won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of green fluorescent protein in a jellyfish called the crystal jelly. (The two scientists that shared the prize with him examined how to actually use GFP in research.) Many non-scientists are undoubtedly a bit puzzled by this discovery… Is glowing jellyfish green stuff really Nobel Prize-worthy? But since its discovery in 1962 by Shimomura and further development in the '90s, it has become crucial for many experiments in cell biology. To illustrate, we’ll travel back to the halcyon days of 2006, when this Bostonist actually worked with GFP in a lab!

We won’t bore you too much with the technical stuff (especially because it uh…didn’t end up working), but the premise was to develop a strain of bacteria which could attach itself to cancer cells. This wasn’t something that these bacteria were naturally inclined to do, but a gene could be inserted which (in theory) allowed the little guys to latch on to those evil cancer cells like… duct tape, perhaps? Bacteria can’t be forced to take these genes in (and they’re surprisingly resistant to reason), but you can attach the gene for GFP to the one you are interested in, and then voila! The bacteria you want to use in the experiment are the ones that glow green.

So there you go, one example of a web columnist’s brush with the discovery that just won a Nobel Prize. Thanks and congratulations, Dr. Shimomura.

Crystal jelly image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The jellyfish was unavailable for comment about the Nobel Prize.