Prasher's profile picture from his LinkedIn pageDouglas Prasher got a lot of media attention in October 2008 when word came from Stockholm that a trio of researchers was getting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (GFP). Prasher had been the first to clone the gene for GFP and had shared the cDNA with two of the researchers who got the prize, but he was not included among the ranks of Martin Chalfie, organic chemist Osamu Shimomura, and University of California, San Diego, biologist Roger Tsien. In fact, at the time the announcement was made that the GFP researchers were awarded the prize, the erstwhile biochemist Prasher was working as a courtesy shuttle driver at a Huntsville, Alabama, Toyota dealership.
But now, after 4 years marked with some of the same ups and downs that landed Prasher behind the wheel of that courtesy shuttle in the first place, the 61-year-old has made his way back to the lab—specifically, the bustling lab of Tsien.
And Prasher is back to working with fluorescent proteins. As a staff research associate in Tsien’s lab, he’s developing a novel high-throughput process to identify new fluorescent proteins via mutagenesis. “Douglas is trying to build a system to screen large mutant libraries to isolate cells displaying desirable time-dependent optical phenotypes that cannot be found using fluorescence-activated cell sorting,” Tsien wrote in an email to The Scientist. “He seems enthusiastic now and in a supportive environment. His talents should be able to flourish ...
