Martin Chalfie biography
Date of birth : 1947-01-15
Date of death : -
Birthplace : Chicago, Illinois, United States
Nationality : American
Category : Science and Technology
Last modified : 2011-08-18
Credited as : Scientist, biologist GFP, Nobel Prize in Chemistry
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He holds a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University.
Between earning his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard, Martin Chalfie worked as a dress salesman and high school teacher, having decided he was not suited for a career in science. In his first academic post, a summer position in a lab at Yale, he strayed from his assigned task but found a noteworthy result using an alternate means to measure chloride transport in the cornea of frogs. He is best known for his work with green fluorescent protein (GFP), which has enabled scientists to better understand how organs function, how disease is spread, and how infected cells respond to treatment.
He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sharing the honor with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Y. Tsien. Chalfie slept through the early-morning notification call from the Nobel Committee, and discovered he had won the highest honor in science when he visited the Nobel website, he said, "to find out what schmuck won this year" and found his own name on the website's front page. Chalfie's wife, geneticist Tulle Hazelrigg, completed the the first successful GFP fusions.
