26 November 2008

Sweden Honors American Nobel Laureates

Winners say international communication, collaboration reasons for success

President Bush with Nobel Prize winners Paul Krugman, economics (left), and Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien, chemistry (right).

By Daniel Gorelick
Staff Writer

Washington — Three of the 2008 Nobel Prize winners, at a forum on how their discoveries can influence mankind, emphasized the importance of communication for advancing science.

Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien, winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Paul Krugman, winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, participated in the “Improving Life” discussion at the Swedish Embassy in Washington.

The event was held just before the prize-winning scientists met with President Bush, and two weeks before they will receive their awards at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.

Chalfie and Tsien, together with Osamu Shimomura, received the chemistry prize for the discovery and development of a fluorescent protein whose use has revolutionized biological imaging. (See “Four Americans Share in Nobel Science Prizes.”)

Krugman won the economics prize for proposing a new model of international trade that has led to increased understanding of global trade and urbanization. (See “Nobel Prize for Economics Goes to American Professor.”)

Chalfie, Krugman and Tsien answered questions from the audience on a broad range of topics, including science funding, communication and predicting the utility of basic research.

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION AND COMMUNICATION

Chalfie stressed the importance of international collaboration in scientific research. He has attracted “incredible minds” from all over the world to his laboratory because of the reputation of graduate schools in the United States. Non-American scientists have been “essential to my work,” he said.

“One of the most fruitful collaborations I’ve had was with a biochemist and surgeon in Germany who came to me with a wonderful experiment, so it’s been very nice,” Chalfie said. “The collaborations [with scientists working outside of the United States] have been just as important — numerically, probably even more important — than what I’ve worked on with people within the United States.”

The panelists also discussed the importance of free and open communication.

Tsien said the green fluorescent protein (GFP) was a contamination in protein-purification experiments made by Shimomura while he studied bioluminescence in jellyfish. About 95 percent of Shimomura’s work has been to understand bioluminescence — reactions involving two or more chemicals that produce light in living animals, according to Tsien. Fluorescence, such as that produced by GFP, is a different type of light-producing reaction, and was not Shimomura’s main focus.

GFP might have remained a curiosity had Shimomura and other scientists not published their findings or discussed them openly at scientific conferences.

“I found out about GFP not because I was looking for it, but because I went to a neurobiology seminar,” Chalfie said. That led Chalfie to genetically modify a worm to produce GFP in a restricted population of cells, enabling scientists to track proteins inside living cells.

Tsien added that his contributions, producing GFP variants that glow in different colors, which allow researchers to track multiple proteins and cell types in a single animal simultaneously, were “peripheral to our main interests.” It was only publishing the work in scientific journals and through the Internet that lead to collaborations enabling these experiments.

GFP is used by scientists all over the world and is continually being modified to improve imaging applications.

In collaboration with scientists at the Russian Academy of Science, Evrogen, a biotechnology company in Moscow, developed a fluorescent protein called Dendra2 that glows green, like GFP, but will also glow red when exposed to blue light. Such “photoswitching” allows scientists to track a subset of cells within a large tissue. Imagine genetically engineering all kidney cells to produce Dendra2, so that they glow green, but then exposing only a small percentage of kidney cells to blue light so that they glow red and can be distinguished from their green neighbors.

IMPORTANCE OF FUNDING BASIC RESEARCH

All of the panelists stressed that funding basic research often has unpredictable, but socially important, applications. Chalfie and Tsien said that nobody could have predicted that studying how jellyfish glow would have led to a revolutionary approach to biomedical imaging that has shed light on our understanding of disease.

According to Krugman, many companies are reluctant to fund basic research on why international trade works. He credited the National Science Foundation for supporting his work during the early stages of his career. In hindsight, Krugman’s discoveries about fundamental economic principles seem obvious, but they often were mathematically difficult to prove. “It took many years of hard work to make it seem trivial,” Krugman said.

Chalfie added that although he has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for his entire academic career, he often uses the money to work on projects other than the ones for which he received specific funding. “Not once did I have funding to work on GFP,” he said. Working in academia with government funding “gave me the freedom to follow my intuition.”