Faculty Obituaries

Nobel Laureate Osamu Shimomura (Hon.’10) Dead at 90 MED professor emeritus discovered protein aiding in cancer and other research | BY RICH BARLOW

O S  never forgot the atomic bomb- ing of Nagasaki, Japan. He was a teenager working at a factory there when the brighter-than-the- sun ash ooded through the windows. “We were blinded for about 30 seconds,” Shimo- mura (Hon.’10) recalled six decades after the 1945 strike. “Then, about 40 seconds after the ash, a loud sound and sudden change of air pressure followed.” As he made for his home about 16 miles from the epi- center, black rain drizzled on him, darkening his white shirt to a grimy gray. His research about how cancer Osamu Shimomura (Hon.’10) That hope was well grandmother scoured him metastasizes, as well as other (left) receiving his Nobel founded, as Princeton in a bath, possibly saving studies in ¨elds like ecology medal in 2008. He was one University, which was him, he speculated, from and chemistry. of three sharing the prize studying luminescent in chemistry. any lingering radiation. Shimomura was also a jelly¨sh, recruited him That brush with sci- former senior scientist at as a researcher in 1960. ence’s awesome power to the Woods Hole Marine There, in 1962, he managed destroy didn’t dissuade Biological Laboratory. by Japan in the 1930s. He to extract two proteins Shimomura—who died He made his prize- graduated from Nagasaki from the Aequorea victoria in Nagasaki on October winning discovery years Pharmacy College and jelly¨sh, found o® the 19, 2018, at age 90—from before his BU tenure. went to work at Nagoya waters of Washington State: becoming a scientist. In Shimomura joined the University, where he also aequorin and GFP; the latter 2008, the BU School of faculty at BU in 1982 as a earned a master’s and a glows green when exposed Medicine professor emeritus professor of physiology. He PhD. He began studying the to the former. shared the Nobel Prize in was retired from BU when light-emitting properties After years of summer chemistry for discovering he won the Nobel, and the in a species of Japanese trips to Washington— the green uorescent protein University immediately crustacean, succeeding in during those trips, he (GFP) in jelly¨sh. conferred emeritus status purifying and crystallizing said, he and his colleagues These “tiny molecular on him. the compound that helped typically harvested 3,000 ashlights,” President The son of a Japanese produce the glow. of the tiny jelly¨sh a day— Robert A. Brown said when army captain, Shimomura “Since the end of the he and the team mapped Shimomura came to BU lived for part of his child- war, my life had been dark,” out the workings of the the following year to read hood in Manchuria, where Shimomura wrote in his luminescence in the 1970s. his Nobel presentation, his father had been sta- Nobel essay, “but this gave He left Princeton after

enabled otherwise undoable tioned during its occupation me hope for my future.” joining the MED faculty. WIKLUND ANDERS SWEDEN, PHOTO/SCANPIX AP

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