GFP: Lighting up life

Abstract

You can observe a lot by watching. Yogi Berra My companions and I then witnessed a curious spectacle … The Nautilus floated in the midst of … truly living light[,] … an infinite agglomeration of colored … globules of diaphanous jelly … . Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy I want to thank the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation for this amazing and surprising honor. At first I wondered why I, a biologist and a person with less than enviable college grades in chemistry, had been selected. Then I realized that this prize had actually been given to the GFP molecule, and I am one of its assistants. Thank you for letting me be part of the celebration of a wonderful tool for visualizing life. Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate. Indeed, we often mark our progress in science by improvements in imaging. The first Nobel Prize, the physics prize of 1901, was an imaging prize, given to Wilhelm Rontgen for his discovery of X-rays and their astonishing ability to allow the noninvasive viewing of the human skeleton. A few years later the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded for the development of silver nitrate staining to visualize nerve cells by Camillo Golgi and its improvement and use by Santiago Ramon y Cajal to demonstrate the cellular nature of the nervous system. This research laid the groundwork of modern neurobiology. Over the years several other imaging techniques … 1E-mail: mc21{at}columbia.edu