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USA – GENE SCIENTISTS WIN NOBEL PRIZE
Gene silencers win Nobel medicine prize
3 October, 2006. Source: The Australian (Reuters, AP)
STOCKHOLM: Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Medicine last night for their discovery of how to "silence" genes, which has opened potential new paths for treating disease.
The discoveries of Professor Fire and Professor Mello offered "exciting possibilities" for use in gene technology, said the Nobel Assembly of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute.
"It's amazing. It just hasn't sunk in yet," Professor Mello said from his home in Massachusetts, after learning that he would share the prize, with Professor Fire, of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.8 million).
Professor Fire, 47, and Professor Mello, 45, showed through experiments with nematode worms that a form of ribonucleic acid, or RNA - the cellular material that transmits genetic information - can switch off targeted genes in a process known as RNA interference (RNAi). They published their findings in 1998.
This technology has become a hot area of research for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, which view it as a promising new way to tackle a range of conditions.
"I had an inkling that it might be possible, but I am only 45 so I thought it might happen in 10 or 20 years or so," said Professor Mello, a professor of pathology and genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. He said the two might give some of the money to charity.
The Nobel science prizes are usually given for work done decades earlier.
Professor Fire, a professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, told Swedish radio he was very happy. "At first it was difficult to believe," he said.
"I am still the same person. My goals are still fairly simple goals of research and science and teaching and family, and I don't expect that to change."
Last year's medicine prize went to Australians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren for discovering that bacteria, not stress, cause ulcers.
The medicine prize kicks off two weeks of announcements that will end with the Nobel Peace Prize on October 13.
Tonight's physics prize announcement will be followed tomorrow by chemistry. The economics prize will be announced next Monday.
The literature prize announcement is likely to be made this Thursday or next.
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