Martin Chalfie

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.

What I am primarily is a neurogeneticist: I use genetics to study problems in neurobiology. The one problem I study primarily... understanding of the sense of touch.

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.

If you do an experiment and it gives you what you did not expect, it is a discovery.

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

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 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.

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 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.

One of the great things about working on C. elegans was the fact that it was transparent, and so when I first heard that seminar describing GFP, and realised, 'I work on this transparent animal, this is going to be terrific! I'll be able to see the cells within the living animal.'

Indeed, we often mark our progress in science by improvements in imaging.