This just came in: two American scientists have won this year’s Nobel for Medicine or Physiology. Andrew Fire & Craig Mello, of Stanford and University of Massachusetts respectively. Check out the announcement from the Nobel committee at the Karolinska.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2006/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/10/02/nobel.medicine.ap/

 Fire and Mello were instrumental in the development of RNA interference using double stranded RNA. Using this method, one could design a small interfering RNA (siRNA) towards a specific gene, thereby inhibiting the expression of that particular gene. This tool has been of great use in the field of molecular biology, since it gives scientists a way to downregulate the expression of specific genes, and as such, enables them to investigate the roles of specific proteins in a biological system or a physiological or pathological process.

It is interesting to note that the Nobel Prize foundation and the Associated Press websites initially made an error by listing Fire and Mello as faculty members of MIT and Harvard respectively. In actual fact, Fire got his PhD from MIT while Mello did his at Harvard. That was as much affiliation as they had with those two institutions.

Not realizing the error in the reports, the Harvard Office of News and Public Affairs posted the links to the Nobel and AP websites, which in turn generated some confusion amongst the Harvard community. Later today, they reissued a new statement to correct the reporting error. Subsequently, a check with those two website also revealed that the reporting error was rectified promptly.