this story to my attention.
“In a couple of months, Roger Y. Tsien and Martin Chalfie will head to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and $450,000 each in prize money in recognition of their development of a revolutionary technique that lights up the inner workings of living cells.
Meanwhile, the scientist who provided the essential piece that made Dr. Tsien’s and Dr. Chalfie’s work possible — a jellyfish gene that produces a fluorescent protein — is out of science.
Douglas C. Prasher, who conducted his research on the Aequorea victoria jellyfish while at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts in the early 1990s, now drives a courtesy van for a car dealer in Huntsville, Ala., earning $10 an hour."
A story of a clearly talented scientist lost to the profession due to the vagaries of funding and academic tenure. He is remarkably calm about the way the administrators of his once chosen profession treated him, and generous about his erstwhile colleagues who are about to become Nobel laureates.
Perhaps whoever becomes US President today needs to think about Douglas the ex-biochemist as much as Bud the plumber, or whoever it was was Mr McCain elevated to folk(sy) hero status.
That is a remarkable story, and very sad. Someone pointed me to a longer history of GFP that is also interesting.
Esteemed Mr. Darwin, I wanted to bring to your attention a recent comment thread devoted to evolution in the context of cancer development.
I also wanted to suggest that you update your profile with at least one publication.