Dear Science

I read that the three guys who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
this year immediately went out and added their names to a list of Nobel
Prize winners for Obama. That’s fucking awesome. Just for this, I want
to know exactly what these guys did to earn the Nobel Prize.

U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

By isolating the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP),
they made it possible for us to turn cells fluorescent colors. A
jellyfish species from Vancouver Island, Aequorea
victoria, did most of the work.

Light contains energy. (This is why you get sunburned when exposed
to ultraviolet light.) Of the light we can see, blue light is most
chock-full of energy, followed by green, and finally red. Shine
blue light on the GFP and the electrons in the protein start buzzing

about, as the protein absorbs the energy contained in the blue
light. As the electrons calm down a bit, the protein shines green
light back at you, returning some of the energy back.

Fluorescence is this returning back of light energy as a new (lower
energy) shade of light. A ton of dyes do this (witness the 1980s). GFP
is amazing because it is a protein that can fluoresce, and thus can be
made from a gene.

Insert the gene for the green fluorescent protein into a cell, and
suddenly the cell glows green under blue light. If you inject
these cells into an animal, you can follow them just by shining blue
light and looking for the green GFP shining back at you. Put the GFP
gene under a promoter (a stretch of DNA controlling when a gene turns
on or off) that only turns on when the cell is starved for oxygen, and
you can detect oxygen-starved cells by looking for the green cells
under blue light.

Attach the GFP gene to other genes, and you can follow proteins
around inside a living cell. Attach it to the little motors that
move stuff around in the cell, and you can follow the traffic.
Beautiful videos exist of the highways within the long nerve cells of
the body, thanks to these hybrid proteins. Combine GFP with a
calcium-sensing gene, and you can make heart cells that flash green
every time they beat.

Science’s career in the lab has met GFP multiple times. GFP was the
first protein that I added into a cell. I engineered GFP into a
modified version of HIV, as a control for an antitumor vaccine. Science
was in the lab looking for cells with GFP in them when the 2004
election results started rolling in.

The past eight years—presided over by a president who rails
incoherently about “man-animal hybrids,” among other absurd
concerns—have been amazing ones in the life sciences. Good for
Martin Chalfie, Osamu Shimomura, and Roger Y. Tsien—the
discoverers of GFP and new Nobel laureates—for calling for a
president prepared to understand our advances.

Optimistically Yours,

Science