Nobel chemists get the green light

So, how can a glowing jellyfish protein be worthy of a Nobel Prize? 

Aequorea victoria drifts with the currents off the west coast of North America and is remarkable in that it produces a green and eerie glow. In the 1960s, Shimomura was studying bioluminescence, the chemical reactions within living organisms that produce light. He had isolated a bioluminescent protein that gave off paradoxically blue not green light from A. victoria. His follow-on studies revealed in 1962 a second jellyfish protein that absorbs the blue light from the first and re-emits it as a green glow. The protein was later to become known as green fluorescent protein (GFP).