By Associated Press
Huntsville – A Huntsville van driver who unknowingly helped scientists win this year's chemistry Nobel Prize is headed to Sweden to watch them collect the award.
Douglas Prasher, 57, and his wife are flying to Stockholm on Thursday at the invitation of 2008 Nobel winners Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien. The pair won the $1.4 million prize for figuring out how to use a glowing green protein from jellyfish to study how cells work.
Research done by Prasher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Mass., in the 1980s was critical to their discovery.
Prasher has a doctorate in biochemistry but has struggled to find work in his field in the last couple of years. He now works as a courtesy van driver at Bill Penney Toyota in Huntsville.
Chalfie works at Columbia University and Tsien is a researcher at the University of California, San Diego.