Woods Hole scientist shares Nobel
Jellyfish discovery aids cell research
WOODS HOLE - It had been less than nine hours since 80-year-old Osamu Shimomura learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the soft-spoken scientist had this to say: "It has ruined my life."
Since his wife woke him up to take a 5 a.m. phone call from Sweden, the senior scientist emeritus at the Marine Biological Laboratory had fielded dozens of congratulatory phone calls from colleagues throughout the world and two previous Nobel laureates from his native Japan. He had held a late-morning press conference at his former Woods Hole lab, which was attended by as many Japanese journalists as American media.
"I like to avoid the attention," said Shimomura, holding a water bottle at his side, as he sat in a laboratory conference room yesterday afternoon. "If possible, I would like to go back to my old life."
But the old life may need to be on hold now that he has received the world's highest honor in science for discovering a green fluorescent protein in jellyfish. By attaching this protein to cells, scientists have found ways to track and see biological processes under a microscope that were previously invisible, such as how cancer cells spread.
He shared the prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, with Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego, who built on Shimomura's work to make the glowing protein, called GFP, an important, everyday tool in biomedical labs worldwide.
"GFP technology has revolutionized what we can see at the most fundamental levels of life," Gary Borisy, director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, said in a statement. "GFP is revealing, for example, how proteins move and interact in cells."
Shimomura, also an adjunct professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, did not see himself destined for intellectual greatness. When he was a teenager during World War II, his education was disrupted when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He remembers being so close that he was "blinded" for seconds after the explosion, though he did not suffer any lasting health problems. He studied at a local pharmacy college and later worked as a research assistant at Nagoya University.
There he was, according to the Swedish Academy, put to work on "a seemingly impossible project - to discover what made the remains of a crushed mollusk, Cypridina, glow when it was moistened with water." To the surprise of colleagues, he extracted a protein that glowed 37,000 times more brightly than the crushed mollusk.
After publishing the results, he was recruited to Princeton University, where he began working with a jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, that glows green when it's agitated. During the summer of 1961, he and Princeton professor Frank Johnson gathered about 10,000 jellyfish in Friday Harbor, in Washington state's Puget Sound. Back at Princeton, Shimomura purified two proteins from the jellyfish, one that glowed blue and another that glowed fluorescent green under ultraviolet light.
"It was one of the hardest things I ever did," he said in a statement released by Princeton.
Chalfie later showed that other proteins in cells could be tagged with GFP, and Tsien figured out how to illuminate cellular structures with multiple colors in addition to green.
Researchers now routinely use GFP to study, for example, nerve cell damage in Alzheimer's disease, or how insulin-producing cells develop in the pancreas. In fact, in the field of cell and developmental biology, half of all papers published in the past 10 years relied on GFP or related tags, according to Princeton.
Colleagues describe Shimomura as someone who does not boast of his achievements - some of which came with the aid of his wife who helped collect buckets of jellyfish over the years.
"He's a very quiet individual and low key," said James Head, professor of physiology and biophysics at BU medical school who worked with Shimomura on some research projects. "But he can get very intense on the subject of his research."
Borisy said Shimomura, who worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory for two decades, always pointed out his humble educational origins, showing that "You can come from a small university and win a Nobel prize."
At yesterday's press conference, the tall, slender Nobel winner, dressed casually in a cardigan sweater and tan slacks, said the key to scientific breakthroughs is hard work and persistence.
"Don't give up," despite the inevitable difficulties and frustrations of research, he urged aspiring young scientists.
Shimomura, who has two children, said he was happy and surprised to learn he had won the Nobel Prize, especially since his work on jellyfish proteins won in the chemistry category.
"I don't think it has any relation to chemistry," he said.
Though he retired about seven years ago, he said, he still values hard work and makes time for his own special research projects. He said he and his wife, Akemi, expanded their Falmouth home, so he could create his own laboratory. In his retirement, he has also taken up some hobbies, including collecting art prints.
"It's important to have a hobby to make your mind correct and straight," he said. "To avoid any misjudgment."
He said he does not intend to put his one-third share of the $1.4 million prize money to private use, though declined to say how he would use the money.
Shimomura said he knows he will be asked to speak at events and be asked to take many plane trips. His hope, however, is to return to the peaceful life in Falmouth, where he and his wife are used to "little attention."
Patricia Wen can be reached at wen@globe.com.
Correction: Because of an editing error, a story on yesterday's Page One about Osamu Shimomura winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry misidentified the lab where he held his press conference. It was at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. 