RNAi gets its prize.

摘要

Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of RNA interference or RNAi. The time from their discovery, published in 1998, to their recognition by the Nobel Prize committee is remarkably short, shorter even than the time between Watson and Crick's discovery of the DNA double helix (1953) and their Nobel prize (1962). What is so revolutionary about RNAi that it should receive this accolade so quickly? For that matter, why should neurologists and neuroscientjsts care about RNAi?To answerthese questions we first need to review what Fire, Mello, and colleagues1 found intheir landmark paper. Using the nematode as their model, they discovered a powerful RNA-based mechanism for silencing genes in a potent and highly specific manner. For sometime it had been known that one could silence genes with antisense technology, in which an oligonucleotide complementary to a targeted messenger RNA binds to it and blocks its translation into protein. But antisense molecules