Two American scientists, Craig Mello and Andrew Fire, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine yesterday for their discovery of RNA interference, a process that offers astounding potential for treating disease by manipulating genes.
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute in Sweden bestowed the award upon Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and his colleague, Andrew Fire of the Stanford University School of Medicine, for their findings related to RNA interference.
The pair will share a prize of $1.4 million. Their seminal work, published a mere eight years ago in Nature, showed that certain RNA molecules can be used to turn off specific genes in animal cells. The discovery marked the first time that biologists were able to selectively "silence" the voice of one gene in the chorus of the tens of thousands that pilot a cell throughout its development and death.
Mello, 45, and Fire, 47, said they were shocked by the news, as the Nobels often are awarded to researchers in the twilight of their careers, decades after a pivotal achievement.
"I thought we were too young to win," an ebullient Mello said at a press conference after disclosing that his wife hung up on a 4:40 a.m. phone call from the prize committee, dismissing it as a crank call. He had then risen to check on the blood sugar level of his 6-year-old daughter, Victoria, who suffers from Type 1 diabetes. The phone rang again and he answered.
At the same time, but technically earlier in the morning, in California, Fire was not even close to being awake.
"At first, of course, I couldn't believe it. I could be dreaming or it could be a mistake or something like that. But I guess it's not," Fire told Swedish Radio, minutes after being notified. "And it's very nice."
In the interval since the team's findings, RNA interference, or RNAi, has become a widespread research tool.
It also has shown startling clinical promise. RNAi-based treatments are being tested for many diseases -- high cholesterol, HIV, cancer and hepatitis, among others -- and clinical trials have been launched in humans with specific types of macular degeneration and pneumonia.
The work has already caught the eye of the scientific elite. Science magazine has dubbed the research the "breakthrough of the year."