Osamu Shimomura: Nobel Prize-winning Japanese scientist for his work on brilliant marine life in the dark

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 fighter jet engines about nine miles from town. They followed them on a Thursday morning in August 1945, when they took an unusual route to the city center.

"We were blinded for about 30 seconds," recalls Osamu Shimomura. The atomic bomb dropped by the Americans 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 that there was a huge explosion somewhere, but we did not know where.

Shimomura, who was then 16, came out of the attack, shaken but physically unharmed – a blessing that he later attributed to his grandmother, who had insisted that he take a bath after returning from the factory soaked with extremely radioactive "black rain".

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 breed of crustaceans to shine, he wrote: "Since the end of the war, my life was dark, but it was for me for my future ".

In 1961, Shimomura had discovered an unusual protein in a beautiful glowing jellyfish – a discovery that deserved it, as well as the two colleagues he worked with, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008. It was the basis of a new a tool that allows biologists to follow the complex movements of individual cells and proteins.

Shimomura was a senior researcher at the Massachusetts Marine Biology Laboratory from 1982 to 2001, when he retired. He was also Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Medicine at Boston University. He died in Nagasaki at the age of 90.

Traveling to find specimens, he studied earthworms in Bermuda, rockworms and limpets in New Zealand, as well as a plethora of glowing bacteria, glittering fireflies, squid and neon-colored krill. . Her main discovery was a North American jellyfish, Aequorea Victoria, sometimes called Crystal Jelly.

In the early sixties, he was working at Princeton University when fellow biologist Frank Johnson turned his attention to animals and suggested Shimomura to go to Friday Harbor, Washington, where jellyfish seemed to be gathering. in Puget Sound.

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 tide stream ".

With a simple dip, he and a team of Princeton picked up the jellyfish one by one, using a pair of scissors 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 green fluorescent protein, or GFP, which appears fluorescent green under ultraviolet light, has remained poorly known for more than two decades, until Martin Chalfie, professor of biology at Columbia University, decides to use 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. "

After the gene that makes the protein was discovered by Douglas Prasher, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Chalfie inserted it into the bacterium E. coli and then, in 1994, into several roundworm cells, thus forming a "lantern" molecular. , which made these cells shine green under ultraviolet light.

Another scientist, Roger Tsien, who died in 2016, widened the palette, discovering that the mutation of the GFP gene could create different colors and illuminate the glow.

The Shimomura jellyfish gene is now used to "tag" different proteins in cells and different cells in organisms, while researchers follow the processes ranging from the development of nerve cells in the brain to the spread of cancer throughout the body. . For their work with GFP, Shimomura, Chalfie and Tsien all shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Nipam Patel, director of the Marine Biology Laboratory, says the winners' work marked the beginning of a revolution in the field of microscopy and biological imaging.

"With GFP, you can see exactly what's going on inside a living organism. You can see what neurons do, how neurons are connected to each other. You can monitor what individual proteins do in a cell or observe individual bacteria in a colony.

"It changed the way we did experiments, where we depended on things that were dead, and we tried to guess what was going on in life. Now you can watch the processes as they happen. "

Son of an army captain, Osamu Shimomura was born in Fukuchiyama, Kyoto Prefecture, in the late 1920s. He spent part of his childhood in the Chinese region of Manchuria, where his father served in the Japanese occupation forces, and in Sasebo, near Nagasaki, where his grandmother raised him with a younger brother, while his parents lived in an outpost of the army near the Soviet frontier.

In 1944, as the war turned against Japan, Shimomura's father invited the family to move into the countryside to avoid American bombing raids. Shimomura's mother took them to his parents' home in Isahaya, near Nagasaki, where he and his 10th classmates were assigned to an arsenal of naval planes that were later destroyed by American bombers, killing some friends of Shimomura.

Outstanding student in high school, when he found little time to study in the war effort, Shimomura attempted to enter three separate colleges, but was rejected each time. He was finally admitted to the Nagasaki College of Pharmacy, despite the lack of interest he wanted to become a pharmacist. After graduating in 1951, he studied organic chemistry with Yoshimasa Hirata at Nagoya University and realized his successful experiments with Japanese crustacean, crystallizing a light-emitting compound called luciferin.

He earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1960 and joined Princeton later that year. He stayed at school before joining the Marine Biology Laboratory in 1982. He received the Order of Culture from Emperor Akihito of Japan in 2008.

Survivors include his wife and long-time research assistant, Akemi (née Okubo), a son, a daughter and two grandchildren.

Shimomura said his career in organic chemistry was almost entirely a coincidence. At the university, he had attracted the attention of a professor who had offered to introduce him to a molecular biologist from Nagoya University. But the biologist was not on campus when they arrived in Nagoya and they instead met Hirata.

The chemist talked for a few minutes with Shimomura and then said, "Come to my laboratory. You can start anytime.

"It was surprising because we had just met," wrote Shimomura. "I did not know much about molecular biology or organic chemistry, so it did not matter what specialty I would study. I thought that the words of Professor Hirata could be the direction given by the sky and I decided to go to his laboratory. It seems that this decision has determined my future, leading me to studies of bioluminescence, equorin and green fluorescent protein. "

Osamu Shimomura, marine biologist, born August 27, 1928, died on October 19, 2018

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