In the early 1990s, a Columbia professor named Martin Chalfie heard that another researcher, DouglasPrasher, was trying to locate the gene for a green fluorescent protein (GFP) found in jellyfish.
And she began to fixate on what she considered the cautionary tale of DouglasPrasher, a molecular biologist whose research funding dried up in 1992, when his tenure prospects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution seemed in doubt.