shuttle driver, PhD

This must be one of the saddest stories of a person, of a deserving candidate who did not win the Nobel 2008. From the NYT:

In a couple of months, Roger Y. Tsien and Martin Chalfie will head to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and $450,000 in prize money each in recognition of their development of a revolutionary technique that lights up the inner workings of living cells.

Meanwhile, the scientist who provided the essential piece that made Dr. Tsien’s and Dr. Chalfie’s work possible — a jellyfish gene that produces a fluorescent protein — is out of science.
Douglas C. Prasher, who conducted his research on the Aequorea victoria jellyfish in the early 1990’s, now drives a courtesy van for a car dealer in Huntsville, Ala., earning $10 an hour.

He said he is not bitter or jealous of this year’s winning chemistry Nobelists.