American biologist and professor of pathology and genetics
Andrew Zachary Fire
(born April 27, 1959) is an American
biologist
and professor of pathology and of genetics at the
Stanford University
School of Medicine. He was awarded the
2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
, along with
Craig C. Mello
, for the discovery of
RNA interference
(RNAi). This research was conducted at the
Carnegie Institution of Washington
and published in 1998.
Biography
[
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]
Andrew-Z-Fire was born in
Palo Alto, California
and raised in
Sunnyvale, California
[1]
in a
Jewish
[2]
family. He graduated from
Fremont High School
. He attended the
University of California, Berkeley
for his undergraduate degree, where he received a
B.A.
in mathematics in 1978 at the age of 19.
[3]
He then proceeded to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
, where he received a
Ph.D.
in biology in 1983 under the mentorship of
Nobel laureate
geneticist
Phillip Sharp
.
Fire moved to
Cambridge
, England, as a
Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow
. He became a member of the
MRC
Laboratory of Molecular Biology
group headed by Nobel laureate biologist
Sydney Brenner
.
From 1986 to 2003, Fire was a staff member of the
Carnegie Institution of Washington
’s Department of
Embryology
in
Baltimore
,
Maryland
. The initial work on double stranded RNA as a trigger of gene silencing was published while Fire and his group were at the Carnegie Labs.
[1]
Fire became an adjunct professor in the Department of Biology at
Johns Hopkins University
in 1989 and joined the Stanford faculty in 2003. Throughout his career, Fire has been supported by research grants from the U.S.
National Institutes of Health
.
Fire is a member of the
National Academy of Sciences
and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
. He also serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors and the National Center for Biotechnology, National Institutes of Health.
Nobel Prize
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In 2006, Fire and Craig Mello shared the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
for work first published in 1998 in the journal
Nature
.
[4]
Fire and Mello, along with colleagues SiQun Xu, Mary Montgomery, Stephen Kostas, and Sam Driver, reported that tiny snippets of double-stranded
RNA
(dsRNA) effectively shut down specific genes, driving the destruction of
messenger RNA
(mRNA) with sequences matching the dsRNA. As a result, the mRNA cannot be translated into protein. Fire and Mello found that dsRNA was much more effective in gene silencing than the previously described method of RNA interference with single-stranded RNA. Because only small numbers of dsRNA molecules were required for the observed effect, Fire and Mello proposed that a catalytic process was involved. This hypothesis was confirmed by subsequent research.
The Nobel Prize 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." The
British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC) quoted Nick Hastie, director of the
Medical Research Council
's Human Genetics Unit, on the scope and implications of the research:
It is very unusual for a piece of work to completely revolutionise the whole way we think about biological processes and regulation, but this has opened up a whole new field in biology.
[5]
Awards and honors
[
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Fire has received the following awards and honors:
(By chronological year of award
[6]
)
See also
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References
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External links
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