The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for the discovery of green fluorescent protein. It's split equally among three scientists, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien (and just out of curiousity, how do they choose the order in which they list those names?).
The citation just says "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP," which is bound to produce some snickering. Perhaps it was used in an earmark-funded study of bear DNA, or some such...
My impression, though, based on several years worth of sitting through student talks about biochemistry, is that this really is a critical tool for the study of cell biology and biochemistry. I'm sure there'll be tons of commentary from the Life Science portion of ScienceBlogs, though, so if you want to know all the gory details, look there.
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I hope they didn't discover it in a study of bear DNA - GFP comes from jellyfish.
Several years ago I was involved in a project trying to transform mildew with GFP, so it would glow in the dark. It's a pity we failed.
The winners (in this case) are listed in chronological order. Shimomura first isolated and identified the protein in 1962. Chalfie was the first to apply its use in tagging specific cells in a different organism in the early 1990s. Tsien developed derivative proteins that fluoresced in different colors in 1995.
And just for clarity, this was a chemistry prize (vs bio/physiology) because at it's core, GFP is just a series of conjugated Pi electrons that fluoresce when excited w/ photons of a certain wavelength. And Tsien's work (as well as others, but he has been the most prolific at this) was in understanding how the amino acids in the GFP peptide chain were modified post-translationally to create the Pi electron chain and how new proteins could be made from the same backbone but w/ significantly different spectral properties (ranging from the not-always-accurately-color-matched banana to melon to cherry and others in between).
There's a good video about Shimomura's work on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/vculifesciences. It's the featured video.