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The bombers, he thought, had a certain beauty: they shone silver against the blue sky before dumping their cargo of explosives on industrial facilities near Nagasaki, Japan.
He watched them from a hill next to his own factory, where he was assigned to jet fighter engines about 9 miles from the city. He followed them on a Thursday morning of August 1945 when they took an unusual route to the center of the city. city.
"We were blinded for about 30 seconds," Osamu Shimomura recalls later, referring to the explosion of the American atomic bomb that destroyed nearly half of Nagasaki. "Then, about 40 seconds after the flash, a loud sound and a sudden change in atmospheric pressure followed. We were sure there was a huge explosion somewhere, but we did not know where. "
Dr. Shimomura, then aged 16, came out of the attack, shaken but physically unharmed. He then began an unlikely new life as a chemist, performing experiments that transformed scientists' understanding of bioluminescence, in which living organisms produce and emit light, sometimes in complete darkness.
Recalling his first major achievement as a chemist in the mid-1950s, the crystallization of a substance that allowed a small Japanese crustacean to shine, he wrote one day: "Since the end of the war, my life was dark, but it was hoping for my future. "
Less than ten years later, Shimomura had discovered an unusual protein in a beautiful jellyfish – a discovery that earned him a third of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and was the basis of a powerful new scientific tool for biologists to follow the movements complex cells and individual proteins.
He was 90 when he died Oct. 19 in Nagasaki, according to the Woods Hole Marine Biology Lab, Massachusetts, which announced the death but did not give cause. Shimomura was a senior scientist at the institute from 1982 to 2001, when he retired. He was also Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Medicine at Boston University.
Jellyfish Friday Harbor
During the summer, Shimomura studied bioluminescent worms in Bermuda, cave worms and limpets in New Zealand, as well as a plethora of glowing bacteria, glittering fireflies, squid and colored krill. neon. Her main discovery was centered on a North American jellyfish, Aequorea Victoria, sometimes called crystal jelly.
He was working at Princeton University when a colleague, biologist Frank Johnson, drew his attention to the animals and suggested Shimomura to go to Friday Harbor, where jellyfish seemed to gather in Puget Sound. The two men went together in the summer of 1961, crossing the country with two research assistants – including Shimomura's wife, Akemi – on a seven-day break tour.
In an autobiographical essay for the Nobel Prize, Shimomura writes that they had settled at Friday Harbor Laboratories, a research station run by the University of Washington, where "a steady stream of floating jellyfish passed along the laboratory dock. every morning and evening, riding with the tidal current. "
With a simple dip net, he and the Princeton team picked up the jellyfish one by one, using a pair of scissors – and later a "jellyfish cutting machine" – to eliminate unnecessary parts of the body. Skeptical locals asked Shimomura how he planned to eat jellyfish, doubting that they were actually used for research. But by the end of the summer, he and his team had taken samples from 10,000 of the creatures, which had allowed him to isolate a pair of luminescent proteins early in the following year.
The first and most promising protein, equorin, was then used as an indicator of calcium. The second protein, green fluorescent protein, or GFP, appearing in fluorescent green under ultraviolet light, remained little known for more than two decades, until Martin Chalfie, professor of biological sciences at the University of Columbia, decides to use it in his work with a round transparent worm. .
"It did not take much to realize that if I put this fluorescent protein in this transparent animal, I could see the cells that made it," Chalfie told The New York Times in 2008. "And that's what it's all about. we have defined. to do. "
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