If you do an experiment and it gives you what you did not expect, it is a discovery.
— Martin Chalfie
What I am primarily is a neurogeneticist: I use genetics to study problems in neurobiology. The one problem I study primarily... understanding of the sense of touch.
I had been interested in science from when I was very young, but after a disastrous summer lab experience in which every experiment I tried failed, I decided on graduating from college that I was not cut out to be a scientist.
I entered Harvard in 1965 not really knowing what I wanted to do. This confusion seems to have lost me a fellowship. G. D. Searle and Company, the pharmaceutical firm, had their home office in Skokie, and they gave a fellowship each year to a graduate from my high school that was going to major in science in college.
I was interested in science or, at least, nature from an early age, learning the names of planets, cutting cartoons with facts about animals out of the newspaper and gluing them into a scrapbook, and, with a friend when I was five or six, trying to design a submarine.
For a decade, I had been studying a transparent worm, the C. elegans. I immediately thought, if you could put the G.F.P. gene into C. elegans, you'd then be able to see biological processes in live animals. Until then, we had to kill them and prepare their tissues chemically to visualize proteins or active genes within cells.
Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.
I do think of this prize as the GFP prize, and I happen to fortunately be one of the people that goes along for the ride.
Indeed, we often mark our progress in science by improvements in imaging.
None of the standard high school science courses made much of an impression on me, but I did enjoy the Advanced Placement Chemistry course I took in my senior year. This course had only eleven students and was taught by a rarity for our school, an exchange teacher from England, Mr. Leslie Sturges.
One of the great things about working on C. elegans was the fact that it was transparent, and so when I first heard that seminar describing GFP, and realised, 'I work on this transparent animal, this is going to be terrific! I'll be able to see the cells within the living animal.'
The prize was really for the molecule. In 1962, Osamu Shimomura discovered a protein in a jellyfish that caused it to glow bright green. With colleagues, 30 years later, I was able to insert this G.F.P. gene into bacteria and make them turn green.
We know what molecules are needed to sense light - what turns that signal that detects light into an electrical signal. We know how smells are detected. But we have a vast number of senses for which we know what the signal is, but we don't know what the receiver is.
We have found that fusions of GFP with the RING finger domains of certain E3 ubiquitin ligases creates an unstable GFP. We have used unstable GFP to learn how disruption of microtubules in the touch receptor neurons causes a generalized reduction in protein levels in the cells.
Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.
What I did do a lot as a child was read, and I particularly remember reading all the 'Hardy Boys' books, a set of history books called the 'Landmark Books,' and a series of science books called the 'All About Books.'
People don't generally listen to scientists much.
Mainly I study the sense of touch and what the molecules are that transduce touch. And I use mutants in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to look at that problem.
