Americans Fire and Mello win Nobel Prize in medicine

Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello have won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work in controlling the flow of genetic information, it was announced in Sweden today.

The Karolinska Instutet in Stockholm honoured the pair for their discovery of “RNA interference – gene silencing by double-stranded RNA”.

This was the first of six Nobel prizes to be announced over the next two weeks.