People don't generally listen to scientists much.

I do think of this prize as the GFP prize, and I happen to fortunately be one of the people that goes along for the ride.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The prize was really for the molecule. In 1962, Osamu Shimomura discovered a protein in a jellyfish that caused it to glow bright green. With colleagues, 30 years later, I was able to insert this G.F.P. gene into bacteria and make them turn green.

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.

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.