If you wanted to cure cancer or solve Alzheimer's disease, would you study a
jellyfish? A lot of people would say, 'No way. What does medical research have to do
with the sea creature?' But it turns out that asking a simple question about a
jellyfish led to a powerful new tool that's completely transformed research.
It all began with a simple question: what makes a jellyfish glow? There's a type of
jellyfish known as the crystal jelly. A researcher named Osamu Shimomura began
studying it in the 1960s and he discovered a protein in the jellyfish
that glows bright green under a UV light. It came to be known as the green
fluorescent protein or GFP, for short. Years later, a researcher named Martin
Chalfie heard about the green fluorescent protein at a conference. 'I
got very excited and immediately ignored the rest of the seminar and just sat
there fantasizing about what would happen if we could possibly take his
protein and allow it to be made inside of our worms and look at how things were
being made.' At the time he was studying these small organisms called round worms.
There's all this activity going on inside of an organism that's completely
invisible to researchers — even with a microscope.
Martin realized that he could use GFPs as a way to map inner workings of a round
worms. This was a big deal. Like the invention of the microscope, the x-ray or
the MRI, green fluorescent protein opened up a new world for scientists. They could
suddenly see what was happening inside of a cell that had been completely
invisible before. But the green fluorescent protein wasn't perfect. It
would lose its color over time and it wasn't the ideal color for all studies. Here's
where UC San Diego researcher Roger Tsien enters the story. Roger developed
variants of GFP that were brighter and came in a variety of colors beyond green.
'And we then had to come up with names for these and upon examination the
Crayola website and other consultations, we realized that the simplest — instead of
giving them numerical names, were names like this monomeric banana, orange, tandem
dimer tomato, tangerine, etc., all the way out the plum.' This beach scene in a petri
dish was made using some of these colorful variants in Rogers lab at UC
San Diego. But these glowing proteins aren't just
pretty. They allow researchers to mark and observe more than one thing at a
time. Researchers at Harvard University use them to color nerve cells in a
mouse's brain to see how they form a network. The experiment was called 'the
brainbow.' Today scientists at some of
the world's leading hospitals use green
fluorescent proteins to study all sorts of diseases. UC Davis uses it for HIV
research, while UC San Diego uses GFP to track
breast cancer tumors. And Mass General has used the technology to better
understand Alzheimer's disease. When Osamu Shimomura began his research,
he didn't know that this jellyfish protein would lead to a scientific
revolution. He was just trying to answer a basic question about how our world
works. And in 2008, these three researchers won the Nobel Prize for
chemistry. 'One has to wonder how many other secrets there are out there and
organisms that we are not being able to look at because funding is not viewed as
important for research, when in fact we need to learn so much more.' In science,
ideas are kind of like seeds. If you're lucky a seed will grow and expand the
boundaries of human knowledge, but it's hard to know which seeds will take root.
Take any invention or modern innovation and in its history you'll find decades
or even centuries of odd and obscure research that led to its creation. The
development of green fluorescent proteins took decades of work and it
wouldn't have been possible without sustained funding from federal agencies
like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Funding for federal research agencies is more important than ever as we tackle
some of the greatest scientific and technological challenges of our time. To
find out more about how you can support federal research funding click on the
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