Nobel honors work on glowing jellyfish protein

Chalfie said he slept through the Nobel committee's phone calls early Wednesday and only found out about the prize when he checked the Nobel Web site to see who had won.

"It's not something out of the blue, but you never know when it's going to come or if it's going to come so it's always a big surprise when it actually happens," Chalfie said in New York.

Speaking to reporters by telephone from California, Tsien said he was surprised to receive the award.

"There had been some rumors, but from sources whose reliability was questionable," said Tsien, who also is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In a news release issued by his university, Tsien said he had set his sights on imaging and treating cancer.

"I've always wanted to do something clinically relevant in my career, if possible, and cancer is the ultimate challenge," he said.

Shimomura told Japanese broadcaster NHK that he, too, was surprised, "because I was rumored as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, but not in chemistry."

Gunnar von Heijne, the chairman of the chemistry prize committee, demonstrated the award-winning research to reporters by shining ultraviolet light on a tube with E. coli bacteria containing GFP. The tube glowed in a green fluorescent light.

Von Heijne said that kind of experiment "gets scientists' hearts beating three times faster than normal."

The winners of the Nobel Prizes in medicine and physics were presented earlier this week. The prizes for literature, peace and economics are due to be announced Thursday, Friday and Monday.

So far, three Americans, three Japanese, two French and one German researcher have won Nobel Prizes this year.

The awards include the money, a diploma and an invitation to the prize ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

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