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Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

- Martin Chalfie
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Martin Chalfie
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For a decade, I had been studying a transparent worm, the C. elegans. I immediately thought, if you could put the G.F.P. gene into C. elegans, you'd then be able to see biological processes in live animals. Until then, we had to kill them and prepare their tissues chemically to visualize proteins or active genes within cells.

I do think of this prize as the GFP prize, and I happen to fortunately be one of the people that goes along for the ride.

We have found that fusions of GFP with the RING finger domains of certain E3 ubiquitin ligases creates an unstable GFP. We have used unstable GFP to learn how disruption of microtubules in the touch receptor neurons causes a generalized reduction in protein levels in the cells.

I was interested in science or, at least, nature from an early age, learning the names of planets, cutting cartoons with facts about animals out of the newspaper and gluing them into a scrapbook, and, with a friend when I was five or six, trying to design a submarine.

Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.

I had been interested in science from when I was very young, but after a disastrous summer lab experience in which every experiment I tried failed, I decided on graduating from college that I was not cut out to be a scientist.

I entered Harvard in 1965 not really knowing what I wanted to do. This confusion seems to have lost me a fellowship. G. D. Searle and Company, the pharmaceutical firm, had their home office in Skokie, and they gave a fellowship each year to a graduate from my high school that was going to major in science in college.

None of the standard high school science courses made much of an impression on me, but I did enjoy the Advanced Placement Chemistry course I took in my senior year. This course had only eleven students and was taught by a rarity for our school, an exchange teacher from England, Mr. Leslie Sturges.

What I did do a lot as a child was read, and I particularly remember reading all the 'Hardy Boys' books, a set of history books called the 'Landmark Books,' and a series of science books called the 'All About Books.'

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Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.

Scientific inquiry starts with observation. The more one can see, the more one can investigate.