How Bad Luck and Bad Networking Cost Douglas Prasher a Nobel Prize (2011)

So if he had the vision AND cloned AND published on GFP, why exactly was he not included on the Nobel? Not being an active scientist shouldn't matter. It saddens me that more people wouldn't refuse such honors without Prashers' inclusion. The money differential of inclusion would hardly be life changing, but the nobility differential of the honorees would be.

It's always a very difficult call who to include, given that science is not done in isolation and at most three people can share the price. I don't think not being an active scientist had anything to do with it.

It seems like he should be one of the three. I think the actual honorees shouldn't have accepted the prize without his inclusion. That would have been the noble thing to do.

Because he wasn't one of the ones who turned GFP into a tool. Chalfie and Tsien didn't get the prize for discovering something interesting about the world, they got it for making a tool which revolutionised cell biology.

Turning the clone into the tool required the usual resources of brains, skill, and luck, but it also took years and years of hard graft - Tsien's lab in particular has put an insane amount of work into building an entire rainbow of practically useful fluorescent proteins. I'm sure Prasher would have been only too happy to have bent his shoulder to bear his share of that graft, but sadly, things didn't go that way, and so, in the end, it wasn't him did the work, and it wasn't him who won the prize.

But yeah, poor guy. Academia is an incredibly hard road, and it sheds good people at every level. I was lucky enough that when my scientific career ran out of runway, i had programming to fall back on. Not all of my former colleagues have been so lucky.