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Craig Mello at 2006 Nobel lectures

Craig Cameron Mello (born October 18, 1960 in New Haven, Connecticut) is one of the laureates of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Andrew Z. Fire, for the discovery of RNA interference. This research was conducted at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Mello is professor of Molecular Medicine, and published in 1998.

Mello attended Fairfax High School (Fairfax, Virginia) and later received his BS from Brown University in 1982 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1990. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the laboratory of Dr. James Priess. He is a professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts and has been on the faculty since 1994.

Mello has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000.^[1]

See also: RNAi

In 2006, Mello and Fire received the Nobel Prize for work that began in 1998, when Mello and Fire along with their colleagues (SiQun Xu, Mary Montgomery, Stephen Kostas, Sam Driver) published a paper ^[2] in the journal Nature detailing how tiny snippets of RNA fool the cell into destroying the gene's messenger RNA (mRNA) before it can produce a protein - effectively shutting specific genes down.

In the annual Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scientific Meeting held on November 13, 2006 in Ashburn, Virginia, Dr. Mello recounted the phone call that he received announcing that he had won the prize. He recalls that it was shortly after 4:30 am and he had just finished checking on his daughter, and returned to his bedroom. The phone rang (or rather the green light was blinking) and his wife told him not to answer, as it was a crank call. Upon questioning his wife, she revealed that it had rung while he was out of the room and someone was playing a bad joke on them by saying that he had won the Nobel prize. When he told her that they were actually announcing the Nobel prize winners on this very day, he said "her jaw dropped." He answered the phone, and the voice on the other end told him to get dressed, and that in half an hour his life was about to change.

The Nobel citation, issued by Sweden's Karolinska Institute, said: "This year's Nobel Laureates have discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information."

Mello and Fire's research, conducted at the Carnegie Institution (Fire) and the University of Massachusetts Medical School (Mello), had shown that in fact RNA plays a key role in gene regulation. The BBC noted

(By chronological year of award ^[4])

• Co-recipient (with Andrew Fire) of National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology in 2003.
• Co-recipient (with Andrew Fire, Thomas Tuschl and David Baulcombe) of the Wiley Prize in the Biomedical Sciences from Rockefeller University in 2003.
• Elected member National Academy of Sciences in 2005.
• Co-recipient (with Victor Ambros, Andrew Fire and Gary Ruvkun) of Brandeis University's Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Medical Research in 2005.
• Co-recipient (with Andrew Fire) of the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2005.
• Co-recipient (with Andrew Fire and David Baulcombe) of Massry Prize in 2005.
• Co-recipient (with Andrew Fire) of the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in 2006.
• Inaugural recipient of The Dr. Paul Janssen Award for Biomedical Research by Johnson & Johnson in 2006.
• Co-recipient (with Andrew Fire) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006.
• Recipient of an honorary doctorate by Brown University in 2007. He gave the keynote Baccalaureate Address at Commencement ceremonies.

• Nobel Prize information
• Nobel announcement from Stanford University
• Nobel announcement from the University of Massachusetts
• US Patent 6506559 Genetic inhibition by double-stranded RNA (patent)
• Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans, in Nature, via University of Massachusetts