….was announced today and the winners are, quite appropriately in my humble opinion, Andrew Z Fire and Craig C. Mello for their discovery of the mechanism of "RNA interference – gene silencing by double-stranded RNA".
It is always very exciting when a scientific technique that you are familiar with and is routinely used in your line of work obtains the ultimate recognition. In the short (in scientific terms) eight years since the discovery of its mechanism, RNA interference has turned out to be a great boon for basic biomedical research. The ability to silence a particular gene within a cell helps immensely in understanding the effects of the gene on particular biochemical pathways of the cell. There is also the potential for clinical application in future.
7 Comments
October 2, 2006 at 9:51 am
Oh yipee! Didn’t know until I read it here. Couldn’t be happier. For personal reasons too.
Also subho bijoya to you!
October 2, 2006 at 9:58 am
@M: Glad to be able to break the news ! I heard it on the radio during the morning commute.
Shubho Bijoya - hope you had fun at the Pujo !
October 2, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Yes, my husband called me and left a msg on my cell phone too. He heard it on NPR in the morning
Thanks!
October 3, 2006 at 7:40 am
Also put up the Nobel link on my blog yesterday but the link back to you did not work. fixed it this morning. Sorry about that.
October 3, 2006 at 8:08 am
@M: Thanks……looks from the comments on your post that you have a very close connection to RNAi and/or the Nobel winners. Congrats !
October 8, 2007 at 7:56 pm
[...] This is a discovery that would have won the award sooner or later. Genetically modified mice are now an indispensable part of research into gene function and regulation (more details on the methods and the research here). What is interesting that gene regulation techniques have won the prize on two consecutive years and the gene knockout, an older discovery, won after RNA interference. [...]
October 29, 2007 at 9:03 pm
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