Nobel Laureate and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivor Osamu Himomura Has Died.

[NNadir]

From Nature: Osamu Shimomura (1928–2018)

Growing up during one of the darkest times in history, Osamu Shimomura devoted his long and fruitful career to understanding how creatures emit light. He discovered green fluorescent protein (GFP), with which — decades later — biomedical researchers began to monitor the workings of proteins in living tissue, and to confirm the insertion of genes. For that discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 with neurobiologist Martin Chalfie and the late Roger Tsien, a chemist.

Shimomura, who died in Nagasaki, Japan, on 19 October, was the first to show that a protein could contain the light-emitting apparatus within its own peptide chain, rather than interacting with a separate light-emitting compound. The significance of this discovery was that the gene encoding GFP could, in principle, be copied (or ‘cloned’) and used as a tool in other organisms...

...Born on 27 August 1928 in the town of Fukuchiyama, at the height of Japanese expansionism, Shimomura was the son of an army captain whose frequent postings abroad disrupted his child’s school education. Shimomura’s grandmother instilled in him the samurai principles of honour and fortitude. In 1944, with the Pacific War turning against Japan, he and his fellow school students were mobilized to work in a munitions factory in Isahaya, about 25 kilometres from Nagasaki. On 9 August 1945, he was at work when a blinding flash, followed by a huge pressure wave, signalled the dropping of the atomic bomb on the nearby city. He walked home under a shower of black rain. He later wrote that his grandmother’s quick action in putting him straight in the bath might have saved him from the effects of the radiation.

Without a high-school diploma, he despaired of finding a college place. Eventually, Nagasaki Pharmacy College admitted him in 1948. On graduation, he worked for four years as an assistant in practical classes. He devised research projects in his own time, and his professor obtained permission for him to do a year of advanced study...

...The luciferin paper brought an invitation for Shimomura to join the bioluminescence lab of biologist Frank Johnson at Princeton University in New Jersey. Three weeks after marrying Akemi Okubo in August 1960, Shimomura sailed to the United States, his travel paid for by a Fulbright scholarship...

...He discovered almost at once that it was activated by calcium (later, aequorin became an essential reagent as a glowing marker of calcium release). Shimomura, his family and his research colleagues spent 19 summers at Friday Harbor, collecting hundreds of thousands of jellyfish to obtain enough of the elusive material for a full structural analysis. Until a way of making genetically engineered aequorin became available in the 1990s, Shimomura freely shared his carefully harvested stocks with laboratories the world over...

Remarkable.

He reminds me of another Japanese scientist who labored in obscurity on a difficult project, investing heavily his own time, Shuji Nakamura (now at UC Santa Barbara).

One of my son's professors got his Ph.D. and did a post doc with Nakamura.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Wow, that Nakamura bio was worth the read.

I was an electronics bug in my youth, but never succeeded in getting into solid state chem/physics. Just seemed waaaay to complicated. I was amazed at how non-trivial were the obstacles to blue and green LED's described in that bio.

[NNadir]

2. "In his interview at Matsushita, Shuji made the mistake of discussing the theoretical aspects..."

That's my favorite line in the biography.

"We don’t need theoreticians, the firm’s recruiters told him..."

I also like this part:

Shuji was 34 years old, rather long in the tooth for a student. His fellow researchers at the University of Florida were mostly in their mid-twenties. All of them were PhD students. Shuji’s status was ambiguous. Since he was not studying for a degree, he was obviously not a student. Nor, since he did not have a PhD, could he be a post-doctoral fellow. As a compromise, he was designated a “guest research associate.”

Initially, his fellows treated Shuji as an equal or even, because he was older, as a senior. However, once they discovered that he only had a master’s degree and, worse, that he had not published a single paper, their attitude changed...

The guy definitely has one of the most fun Nobel biographies, especially the part about not being too good at science in high school because of his obsession with Volleyball.

I only became aware of Nakamura when during college tours with my son, my son struck up a conversation with his former graduate student/post-doc at the Materials Science Engineering table. They were chatting quite amiably for about 10 or 15 minutes and I wasn't listening in.

My part of the conversation when I joined it, in which gallium nitride was being discussed, was to suggest that it was not too wise to put too much effort into gallium, since the element is so easily subject to depletion.

(Of course, that's true of much of the periodic table, and a scary thought when you think of the world that our young people will inherit.)

After I left the tour and went home, and realized who the guy was, and I felt like something of an arrogant fool. Of course, I'm used to being an arrogant fool, so it was no big deal. I'd been an arrogant fool before and have been one since.

Included in my arrogant foolishness is that directed at my son. I remind him that Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Prize when she was 17, and therefore he's behind on the project. (He's 19.) He, in turn, reminds me that Malala's Nobel was in peace, not science. I tell him that peace is harder than science. (I'm right in this, although arguably, science can make peace easier to achieve.)

I love my son and his very, very, very, very dry sense of humor. I think he likes mine.

The Nakamura story is a very beautiful one. Since he did much of the Nobel work on his own time and at his own expense, he sued his former company for royalties and won the largest bonus ever awarded at that time to a Japanese industrial scientist. Then he went on to the University of California at Santa Barbara, which has the #1 Materials Science graduate school in the country. From the photographs, he looks supremely happy.