In December 2008 Douglas Prasher took a week off from his job driving a courtesy van at the Penney Toyota car dealership in Huntsville, 
Alabama, to attend the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm. It was the first vacation he and his wife, Gina, had taken in years. On the day of the awards, he donned a rented copy of the penguin suit that all male Nobel attendees are required to wear, along with a pair of leather shoes that a Huntsville store had let him borrow.

At the Nobel banquet, sitting beneath glittering chandeliers suspended from a seven-story ceiling, Prasher got his first sip of a dessert wine that he had dreamed of tasting for 30 years. When the waitress was done pouring it into his glass, he asked if she could leave the bottle at the table. She couldn’t, she told him, because the staff planned to finish it later. His buddies back at Penney Toyota were going to love that story, he thought.

Prasher’s trip would have been impossible without the sponsorship of biologist Martin Chalfie and chemist and biologist Roger Tsien, who not only invited the Prashers but paid for their airfare and hotel. Chalfie and Tsien, along with Osama Shimomura, an organic chemist and marine biologist, had won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The three researchers were sharing the $1.4 million award for the development of green fluorescent protein (GFP), a molecule that makes certain jellyfish glow. Starting in the mid-1990s, scientists began using GFP as a tracer for studying biochemical processes. The results were spectacular: The luminous protein made it possible to glimpse the inner workings of cells, tissues, and organs in unprecedented detail.


Had life turned out slightly differently, Prasher could have been attending the ceremony not as a guest but as a laureate. More than two decades earlier, it was Prasher who cloned the gene for GFP while working as a molecular biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The cloning was the first step in using GFP as a tracer chemical in organisms other than jellyfish. Prasher proposed an experiment to see if the GFP gene could make bacteria glow, but he was not able to pull it off. In 1992, when he was about to leave Woods Hole for another science job, he gave the gene to his colleagues Chalfie and Tsien. They went on to perform the experiments that made GFP and its variants into a powerful research tool, the foundation of a multimillion-dollar industry.

Prasher’s vanishing act provides a glimpse into what it takes to succeed 
in modern-day science.

Prasher had the vision before anybody else did. But he failed to make it a reality.

If GFP’s progression from an obscure protein into a biological laser pointer is a quintessential scientific success story, Prasher’s journey from Woods Hole to Penney Toyota is a tale of individual and institutional failure. His vanishing act provides a glimpse into what it takes to flourish in modern-day science, where mentorship, networking, and the ability to secure funding can be as important as talent and intelligence.

And then there is the role of luck. In life as in science, small underlying variables can translate into wildly divergent outcomes. One misplaced base pair in a DNA sequence can define the gap between health and disease. The paths leading to career success or failure, too, can lie a hair’s breadth apart.

At 58, Douglas Prasher sports a beard liberally flecked with gray. He’s six feet tall with a paunch that invites a fair bit of ribbing from his teenage son. When I visited him at Penney Toyota on a hot and humid Friday afternoon, rows of new cars glinted under the sun, festooned with balloons bobbing in the breeze. Prasher greeted me outside the dealership’s grubby-looking service center, dressed in a blue golf shirt and khaki pants—the company uniform. The courtesy van was parked across from the entrance. Squinting through sunglasses and adjusting his cap, he led me through a corridor to a body shop in the back where he introduced me to some of his colleagues. “They are all self-described rednecks,” he said with a laugh.

Donny, a middle-aged man with a goatee and a golden locket, was bent over the headlight of a car with an open hood. He stood up and thrust his blackened paw out at me with a grin. “We’ve been teaching Douglas about the real world,” he said. Jim, another body shop worker, listed some of the things they had educated Prasher about. They all happened to be local culinary delights: “mountain oysters” (hogs’ testicles), fried moon pies, Goo Goo Clusters. I asked Jim if Prasher had taught them anything in return—say, about DNA. “DN who?” Jim asked, smiling. The comment evoked a chortle from Prasher, whose typical manner combines irony and earthiness.

Prasher was born into a working-class family in Akron, Ohio, where his father and maternal grandfather worked at the Goodyear tire factory. He too worked at the factory for a summer during college; the experience was enough for him to realize that he was not cut out for a blue-collar job. He ended up earning a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Ohio State University, guided by nothing more than a general interest in the life sciences. “I didn’t know what else to study,” he told me.

After Prasher got his doctorate in 1979, he went to work as a postdoc at the University of Georgia in Athens, learning how to clone genes and get them to switch on inside bacteria. It was at the university that he met his future wife, Gina Eckenrode, a Ph.D. student in biochemistry who was drawn to his kindness and wry sense of humor, which was less cynical back then. One day when he was in the lab, she sent him a “gorilla­gram”—a love letter delivered by a person in a gorilla suit. Prasher still feels embarrassed when he recalls the moment. While at Georgia, he also met Milton Cormier, a biochemistry professor who was studying bioluminescence, the ability of certain organisms to produce and emit light. Through Cormier, Prasher learned about a species of jellyfish living in the cold waters of the North Pacific, Aequorea victoria, which emitted a green glow and was one of the most intensely bioluminescent creatures on the planet.