What about Douglas Prasher?

By now everyone's heard about the green florescent protein-developing scientists who won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Shimomura, Chalfie, and Tsien are certainly deserving for discovering and refining GFP to make it arguably the most useful and ubiquitous tool in the arsenals of cell and molecular biologists.

But what about Douglas Prasher? He was the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researcher who cloned the GFP gene in the 1980s, giving the cDNA to both Chalfie and Tsien.

Some of you may have heard Dan Charles' story on NPR about Prasher's current predicament. Charles found Prasher working at a Huntsville, Alabama car dealership as a courtesy shuttle driver. After losing his NIH - and later his NASA - funding, Prasher got behind the wheel, and he's been driving the shuttle for more than two years. Now Prasher's savings are depleted and he's looking for a way back into the lab.

Tsien mentioned Prasher's contribution to the development of GFP as he answered questions from reporters after the prize announcement on Wednesday, but doesn't Prasher deserve more?

Is there anyone out there who might have a research position open for him?

Bob Grant
Associate Editor, The Scientist

I have forward the transcript of the NPR interview to Alex Brownstien, Business Development Director at the Center for Functional Genomics, State University of Albany, New York.
I believe that would be a great place for Douglas Prasher to work and it would be an honor to have him in this area.
Best wishes
John Kennedy
Albany, New York
jkenn99@aol.com

Anyone has email address or contact info of Dr. Douglas Prasher ? I would like to see if Rutgers University can invite him to teach at Rutgers University which has been striving to win over UC Berkeley, or at least, a top public research university in the East Coast.

One way Rutgers University to move up the ranking is to recruit top students from the high schools to apply and accept Rutgers admission, and that has been very successful in 2008, e.g. 1,000 more students accept Rutgers over top universities like UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Cornell University, John Hopkins University, UCSD, ...etc.

Another way for Rutgers University to move up the ranking is to move forward the university bookstores, and that it has outsource to Barnes & Nobel in Nov 2008, and going to build a huge 3 story Barnes & Noble Rutgers University bookstore, so that it will like top universities like UC Berkeley to provide all text books of the coming term as soon as the final of current term finishes so that students will have chance to read ahead.

Yet another way for Rutgers University to move up is to hire top professors, especially, the professors have Nobel Prize Level research standard that can guide and create a vision for all students and faculty to strive for the top level of study. And, I believe Dr. Douglas Prasher is well qualified for and should be invited over.