Martin Chalfie

Origins and early life

Martin Lee Chalfie was born in Chicago on 15 January 1947, the eldest of three sons of Eli Chalfie, a professional guitarist, and of Vivian Friedlen, who ran the family's dress-manufacturing business. His was a Jewish family: his father's parents, who had come to Cincinnati from Brest-Litovsk, were Jewish, his parents had met at a wartime breakfast for Jewish servicemen and women in Chicago, and he remembered leaving temple with his grandmother on the High Holy Days.

He entered Harvard in 1965 and captained its swimming team, but after a summer of failed experiments he left science for a time, selling dresses for his parents and teaching at a school in Connecticut.

Work and career

A summer of research at Yale in 1971 restored his confidence, and he went back to Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in physiology in 1977. As a postdoctoral fellow with Sydney Brenner at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he studied touch-insensitive mutants of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, and in 1982 he joined the faculty of Columbia University. In 1988, at a seminar on bioluminescent organisms, he heard of the green fluorescent protein of the jellyfish Aequorea victoria and saw that it could serve as a glowing signal inside the transparent worm.

Once Douglas Prasher had sent him the gene, his student Ghia Euskirchen made bacteria glow green, proving that no other protein was needed, and Chalfie then lit up six touch receptor neurons of the worm, a result published in Science in February 1994.

Recognition

In 2008 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura and Roger Tsien, for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP, a tag that lets researchers watch proteins move and interact in living cells. He married Tulle Hazelrigg, who later joined him on the Columbia faculty, in 1989, and their daughter Sarah was born in 1992.