U.S. scientists win Nobel for "gene silencing"

Reuters UK ^ | Mon Oct 2, 2006 | Sarah Edmonds and Patrick Lannin

[A. Pole]

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the 2006 Nobel prize for medicine on Monday for their discovery of how to switch off genes, a potential road to new treatments for diseases from AIDS to blindness and cancer.

[...]

Through experiments with worms, the two showed that a double strand of ribonucleic acid, or RNA, the genetic messenger of the cell, can "silence" targeted genes in a process known as RNA interference (RNAi).

[...]

[OpusatFR]

Gee, I thought those great Muslim Universities would have won....

Oh, wait...

They only slice heads.

[A. Pole]

This is another step toward expanding our understanding of evolution mechanisms. As I said many times, if the scientific progress continues we will be freed from the crude and false dogma that random mutations combined with blind selections can account for the complexity of life.

Add this recent discovery to the others like interspecies sharing of genes/reverse transcription and the inheritance of acquired traits will become more evident. Some day Lamarck might be rehabilitated.

"We then went back and intentionally missed the germ line and showed that we could get interference that would, in fact, spread throughout the animal. This was remarkably potent interference using very small amounts of RNA. We could dilute the RNA tremendously and still have an effect.

The other thing that was really remarkable was that you could have the interference effect skip a generation and affect the next generation."

(RNA Interviews)

[massgopguy]

No one silences me! And I'm sick of being blamed for everything too. "Gene causes cancer".

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

So, does this mean that the "gay gene" could be switched off?

[GAB-1955]

Or could it be switched ON?

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

By watching "The View" once too often, perhaps?