US takes 2008 chemistry prize, Nobel league lead - October 08, 2008
UPDATE: see also Great glowing jellyfish! It's the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
In a storming comeback for the United States three of its researchers have snagged the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien take the prize for the Queen of the Sciences “for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP”. Without this work we’d never have got the ‘Brainbow’ that Nature published last year.
Nature News’s chemistry guru Katharine Sanderson will have the full story for you soon. If you can’t wait, below the fold is the outline of a blog drafted on this victory by Nature editor Oli ‘Nostradamus’ Morton last year, who scores 2 out of 3 for prediction (albeit out by a year).
America 4 : Europe 3 : Japan 2
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And the Nobel goes to Osamu Shimomura, Douglas Prasher and Roger Tsien for their work on green fluorescent protein (announcement).GFP was a pretty hot tip for the prize in the chemistry blogosphere (In the Pipeline | ChemBlog) Even so, betting on it at Chembark would still have given you a 15 to 1 payoff.
There's a history of the field at Marc Zimmer's GFP site.
In 1999 Nature Biotechnology published a piece on the work by Roger Tsien. And the whole fascinating firled of biofluorescence is described in Aglow in the dark: The revolutionary science of biofluorescence by Vincent Pieribone and David Gruber, reviewed here in Nature Cell Biology
Comments
This news article is bad journalism. Osamu Shimomura is from Japan, not the United States.
[For this running score we have been using the Nobel committee country attributions, which look at place of work, not country of origin. - Ed.]
Posted by: Don Faigao | October 8, 2008 12:07 PM