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