He tried to find a job in science but failed. So he went to work at the car dealership.

"I got a hard luck story," says Doug Prasher.

He gave away the gene for the protein that, that he discoverd, and later led to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year by a group of there scientists that didn't include him.

Prasher doesn't have any regrets about giving away the gene. Tsien and Chalfie did great work, he says, which he probably couldn't have done because the National Institutes of Health had rejected his funding proposals.

"At that time, I knew I was going to get out of it; my funding had already run out," Prasher says.

more to the story at NPR