THIRUVANATHAPURAM: A year ago, the faculty and students were fortunate to listen to Nobel Laureate Roger Y Tsien at the Indian Science Congress. This year, Tsien’s co-winner of the Nobel award Martin Chalfie was on the Karivattom University Campus to talk to the students - a full house as expected. What’s more, Chalfie, his wife Tulle and daughter Sarah even enjoyed a traditional Kerala lunch on banana leaves along with students and researchers of the University campus.
Best known for his work with green fluorescent protein (GFP), which has enabled the scientists to better understand how organs function, how disease is spread, and how infected cells respond to the treatment. Chalfie was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sharing the honour with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y Tsien.
While visiting the University of Kerala, Chalfie revealed the ups and downs of his journey to discover the GFP, which he said metaphorically and physically was like a lantern.
The scientist revealed that as a young researcher, he was attracted by the work done by the Japanese scientist Osamu Shimomura, who discovered the Aequorin molecule, in the presence of Calcium emitted blue light.
Martin Chalfie went on to discover the GFP, which along with Aequorin, produced green light.
He demonstrated the value of GFP as a luminous genetic tag for various biological phenomena by colouring six individual cells in the transparent roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans with GFP. He correctly guessed that, unlike most forms of bio-luminescence, GFP required no additional enzyme to create light by chemical reaction.
GFP is now used to tag proteins and study their movement with great clarity, within the cell.
He said that scientists are now using it to detect landmines, observe cell division and for pollution monitoring. Fantasy of a man turning green with anger in the movie ‘Hulk’, loosely based on the concept of GFP, has already appeared.
Stressing the need for basic research, Chalfie recalled the designer of the particle accelerator in Fermi lab who stood for basic research. When asked how the US defences will benefit from the research, he responded to the US Senator: “it will not benefit directly the defence of the country, but will make the country worthy of defence.”
Chalfie has published over 200 papers of which at least 16 have over 100 citations. His lab uses the simple nematode to investigate aspects of nerve cell development and function.
KU Vice-chancellor A Jayakrishnan presided over the function.
Achuthsankar S Nair welcomed the gathering. Oommen V Oommen introduced the speaker to the audience and Ashalatha S Nair proposed the vote of thanks.