Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

U. Massachusetts professor wins Nobel prize
By Matt Belliveau
Massachusetts Daily Collegian (U. Massachusetts)
10/03/2006

(U-WIRE) AMHERST, Mass. — The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine to two U.S. researchers, including a medical professor from the University of Massachusetts, for their work toward finding a mechanism that regulates the flow of genetic information in plants, animals and humans.

Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who were given the award Monday, "have discovered a fundamental mechanism," the Stockholm-based Nobel Foundation said in a statement on its Web site Monday. The discovery, called RNA interference, "is already being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes and it may lead to novel therapies."

The duo was awarded the prize eight years after the researchers' work was published in the scientific journal "Nature."

Mello is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass.

Fire, born in 1959, is a professor of pathology and genetics at Stanford University's School of Medicine.

Fire and Mello will share this year's $1.37 million award. Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896.

The scientists studied worms to find out more about what researchers often regard as DNA's little sister, a substance called RNA. Organisms use information encoded by DNA to build substances called proteins, which are central to processes such as digesting food or helping the body defend itself against bacteria. RNA is a copy of DNA used to transport this data.

The researchers found that a certain kind of RNA will block the formation of a given protein. In recent research, for example, RNA was used to block a gene that was responsible for high cholesterol levels in animals' blood.

The Nobel Foundation was created in 1900 and the prizes were first handed out the following year. The economics prize was created in 1969 in memory of Nobel by the Swedish central bank. Only the peace prize is awarded outside Sweden, by the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, Norway.

Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy publicly congratulated Mello in a press conference held in Worcester Monday.

"Dr. Mello's brilliant work has opened up extraordinary opportunities for the discovery of new therapies for cancer, infectious disease, heart disease and many other serious illnesses," said Kennedy. "I also commend UMass President Jack Wilson and Dean Aaron Lazare of the medical school for their leadership. Massachusetts is leading the way in this new century of the life sciences, and today's announcement is recognition of our leadership."

Mello joins UMass astronomy professor Joseph Taylor Jr. and alumnus Russell Hulse, who both won a Nobel Prize in 1993 for finding evidence of the elusive waves in the pulsing of two circling neutron stars, as current prize holders at the University.

Monday morning's announcement opened this year's series of prize announcements. It will be followed by Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

"It's vital that we keep our investment in medical research strong. It is leading not only to breakthroughs in basic sciences, but to a dynamic biotechnology sector as well," said Kennedy.

"Today's announcement is eminently well-deserved recognition of the extraordinary role of UMass in medicine and research," he said. "People across the nation and around the world will now know what we have long realized — that world-class research doesn't stop when you leave Cambridge or Boston. Our entire Commonwealth is leading the way."

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