Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the 2006 Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday for their discovery of how to switch off genes, a potential road to new treatments for diseases from AIDS to blindness and cancer.
Fire, 47, and Mello, 45, are among the youngest in recent history to win the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.37 million). Their work, which was published in 1998, received remarkably swift recognition.
Reuters
Fire, 47, and Mello, 45, are among the youngest in recent history to win the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.37 million). Their work, which was published in 1998, received remarkably swift recognition.
Reuters
1 comment:
This award was given way to early. How do you select the little pieces of mRNA to shut down gene expression? How long does the effect last? There are many questions left to be answered. I've used RNAi in the laboratory and it is not fun. The expectations are high but the reality in the lab can be quite disappointing.
I'd also like point out that this discovery came right after anti-sense RNA experiments failed. The story was ready to be told. Add RNA and watch protein disappear. It's just not very clever. It's popular however because it would be so much easier to use RNAi than to make a knock-out mouse. As it stands, knock-out mice are still the gold standard for studying gene function. RNAi has a long way to go before it is fully understood.
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