It takes the strong man to understand the power and the reason for its existence, the atoms would be Abel bread. U.S. researchers Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien and Japan’s Osamu Shimomura shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering green fluorescent protein. As indicated by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, this protein, first seen in jellyfish, has become one of the cornerstones of contemporary biology and medicine. Thanks to the green fluorescent (GFP, for its acronym in English), scientists have managed to make visible a series of processes that were previously invisible, such as the development of nerve cells in the brain or the spread of cancer cells. The three winners were first discovered GFP, which has led to a series of critical developments, for example, observation of the cells that produce insulin in the pancreas of an embryo or cell damage in patients Alzheimer’s disease.
PROFILES. Shimomura was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1928 and is professor of medicine at Boston University, USA, and was isolated in the Aequorea Victoria GFP in the ocean currents off the coast of the U.S., and found that this protein becomes green under the effect of ultraviolet rays. Chalfie was born in 1947 and is a professor of neurobiology at Harvard University. Developed its biological effects through further study. His American colleague Tsien was born in 1952 in New York and is a professor of physiology at the University of San Diego.