Shimomura, Chalfie and Tsien get Nobel chemistry prize

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday that Japan's Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien have won the Nobel chemistry prize.

The academy said Wednesday they share the prize for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP, which was first seen in jellyfish. Their work has helped scientists study how cancer cells spread.

Shimomura first isolated GFP from a jellyfish found off the West Coast of North America in 1962 and discovered that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light. The academy said in its citation that in the 1990s, Chalfie showed GFP's value "as a luminous genetic tag," while Tsien contributed "to our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces."

Recent winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry

2007: Gerhard Ertl, Germany, for studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces, research that has advanced the understanding of why the ozone layer is thinning, how fuel cells work and even why iron rusts.

2006: Roger D. Kornberg, United States, for work on how information stored within a gene is copied and transferred to the parts of cells that produce proteins.

2005: Yves Chauvin, France, and Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock, United States, for their work and exploration of metathesis.

2004: Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, Israel, and Irwin Rose, United States, for their work in how cells break down.

2003: Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon, United States, for their research on how key materials enter or leave cells in the body and their discoveries concerning tiny pores called “channels'' on the surface of cells.

2002: John B. Fenn, United States, Koichi Tanaka, Japan, and Kurt Wuethrich, Switzerland, for developing methods used in identifying and analyzing large biological molecules.

2001: William S. Knowles and K. Barry Sharpless, United States, and Ryoji Noyori, Japan, for showing how to better control chemical reactions, paving the way for drugs to treat heart ailments and Parkinson's disease.

2000: Alan J. Heeger and Alan G. MacDiarmid, United States, and Hideki Shirakawa, Japan, for the discovery that plastic conducts electricity and for the development of conductive polymers.

1999: Ahmed H. Zewail, United States, for pioneering the investigation of fundamental chemical reactions, using ultra-short laser flashes, on the time scale on which the reactions actually occur.

1998: Walter Kohn, United States, for the development of density-functional theory in the 1960s that simplifies the mathematical description of the bonding between atoms that make up molecules, and John Pople, Britain, for developing computer techniques to test the chemical structure and details of matter.