Molecular imaging scientist shares Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Roger Tsien, Ph.D., addressed the media Oct. 8 after learning he would share the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura, Ph.D., and Martin Chalfie, Ph.D., for the discovery and application of green fluorescent protein as a tagging tool in bioscience and molecular imaging. Shimomura isolated the protein from a jellyfish in 1961 as a researcher at Princeton University. Chalfie demonstrated at Columbia University that the fluorescing protein could tag intracellular material in a roundworm.

At the University of California, San Diego, Tsien engineered a series of mutations creating a palette of fluorescing molecular dyes (right) that have revolutionized small animal optical imaging and molecular pharmaceutical research. (Provided by UCSD)