What did this years winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine discover?
The co-winners of the 2006 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine are two U.S. scientists who discovered a process called RNAi, which stands for RNA interference. They essentially found a more effective way of achieving a gene-silencing effect that had been observed in plants for years. Previous modes of silencing specific genes involved one of two approaches, each of which involved introducing a type of RNA (ribonucleic acid) into an organism and each of which achieved imperfect silencing of a targeted gene. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello found that if they combined both approaches into a single unit of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), the silencing was not only immediate and complete, but it also was inheritable in certain species. A discovery like this is a long process with many steps. Fire and Mello’s 1998 discovery built on a lot of prior work, and a lot more work has been done since 1998 that builds on Fire and Mello’s discov
