The three winners of last year’s Nobel prize for chemistry are here in Lindau, Germany, to tell their tale and give some direction to the student attendees on how to succeed in research. Instrument manufacturers and funding bodies are also being taught a thing or two, whilst unfortunate journal editors are the subjects of their jokes.

I’m not going to tell you how Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien won the Nobel prize for their work on green fluorescent protein (GFP) - that story was covered in two Chemistry World articles last year. I am however going to share with you some of their pearls of wisdom.

For students and researchers:

• Study things that suit your personality. ‘Try to find important problems that put your neuroses to constructive work’ – Tsien
• Look towards biology. ‘Biology has the most interesting grand questions in all of science currently doable by individual’ – Tsien. And he suggests you use chemistry to solve them.
• Work together towards a common goal. ‘Scientific work is cumulative’ – Chalfie.
• ‘Accept that your best papers may be rejected from fashionable journals, or may be accepted for the wrong reasons.’ This was Tsien referring to the fact that his groundbreaking Science paper containing the crystal structure of GFP was initially going to be rejected after two bad referee reports, and was only accepted after the editors heard that a similar paper was to be published in another journal. Chalfie had similar problems when he wanted to have the word ‘new’ in his 1994 Science paper title, and then one of the editors thought the green-coloured journal cover he had designed would look better in another colour!
• A great way to promote your research is to have an artist cause a global media sensation using your findings. Cue Eduardo Kac and Louis-Marie Houdebine and their green fluorescent bunny.

For instrument manufacturers:

• If one of your machines stops selling as well as you would like, cross your fingers and hope that a clever scientist will find a new use for it. According to Chalfie his work on green fluorescent proteins reinvigorated a diminishing market for fluorescent microscopes. When he asked for a freebie microscope in return for all the business he had given them, they said no! That’s gratitude for you.

For funding bodies:

• Put more money into basic/fundamental research. Chalfie says that he thinks that not sufficiently funding the study of basic biological principles is actually slowing down our progress towards curing diseases. The recent $10 billion (£6.75 billion) boost given to the US National Institute of Health (NIH) is being almost entirely spent on applied research, he says, and he’s not impressed.

Nina Notman