Osamu Shimomura, who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering and isolating green fluorescent protein, died on October 19 in Nagasaki, Japan. He was 90 years old.
The Japan Times reports that Shimomura’s early life was heavily shaped by World War II. Born in Kyoto Prefecture on August 27, 1928, he lived in Japanese-occupied northeastern China as a child. Back in Japan, on his first day of 10th grade, Shimomura’s entire class was “mobilized” to work at an aircraft arsenal rather than attend classes. He later recalled a bombing of the arsenal in his Nobel Prize biography: “We ran between bombs burning with white flame; I saw a person who had been hit on the shoulder running with one arm dangling.”
He was still working at the arsenal, outside Nagasaki, when the US military dropped an atomic bomb on the city in 1945.
Shimomura went on to study ...
