Osamu Shimomura Research Paper

In the island town of Friday Harbor, Washington, kids were selling jellyfish to Osamu Shimomura for a penny apiece. The kids were an eclectic mix of locals, summer people, and the offspring of the scientists who had occupied the waterfront, but the jellyfish in their buckets were pretty much alike—formless, colorless blobs about the size of mice. They were blind and brainless, possessing only mouths, muscles, and weak stingers, and one more thing, of enormous interest to Shimomura—rims of punctate green light that ran around their bodies like salt around the edge of a cocktail glass. That first summer in Friday Harbor, in the early sixties, Shimomura and his wife Akemi cut out those rings of glowing flesh with scissors and crushed them in cotton handkerchiefs. In later summers Shimomura’s colleague Frank Johnson created a device called a guillotine, which fixed the animal in place as it was slowly spun around a razor, shedding a neat halo of tissue with every revolution. During their nineteen summers on Puget Sound the Shimomuras processed an estimated eight hundred thousand specimens of Aequoria victoria, the crystal jelly. Osamu Shimomura had come a long way to reach Friday Harbor. He had been born in Nagasaki, and was sixteen in 1945 when the Americans dropped Fat Man. The initial flash was the blue-violet of a welding torch, and brighter …show more content…
The less energy, the closer to the red edge. When aequorin’s blue flash was triggered, some of the energy from the blue light was being stolen by green protein, stripping it of energy and causing it to move closer to the red end of the spectrum. This explained why the jellyfish were studded with green lights, even though aequorin’s flash is blue. This kind of reaction—where light with more energy is made into light with less energy—is called fluorescence. In the wake of this discovery green protein was renamed green fluorescent protein, or