Two Americans awarded Nobel Medicine Prize
[ 2006-10-09 10:17 ]
| Two Americans have won this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine. Hans
Jornvall, the Secretary of the Nobel forum, made the announcement in
Stockholm.
"The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has
today decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2006
jointly to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello for their discovery of
RNA
interference, gene silencing by
double-stranded RNA," he said.
Fire from Stanford University and
Mello from the University of Massachusetts published their groundbreaking
work in the journal, Nature, in 1998.
Their work centered on discovering a method of turning off selected
genes - an important new tool that fellow scientists hope will lead to new
treatments for things like HIV, cancer, and other illnesses.
On hand at the announcement ceremony, Goran Hansson from the Nobel
panel explained their work in the context of other research going on in
the exciting field.
"It follows in that line of major discoveries of how our genes function
to control life. Of course there were many scientists involved in this
field who made contributions but many questions, as I said in my
presentation, remained. So it was quite a paradigm shift when Fire and
Mello presented this paper and provided an explanation for all these
questions that were raised," explained Hansson.
While both Fire and Mello knew there was the possibility of winning
this year's prize, usually it is not awarded until decades have passed.
Jornvall told the assembled journalists in Stockholm how the news was
received.
"They were both very happy. One of them answered very quickly and
looked like he realized it. The other one first lifted the telephone and
then put it down again, he said."
It is believed the work of Fire and Mello will translate into many new
therapies. The two will share the prize of nearly $1.4 million. |
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RNA : ribonucleic acid
（核糖核酸）
| （來源：VOA 英語點(diǎn)津姍姍編輯）
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