Andrew Fire

Andrew Fire is an American biologist who, with Craig Mello, discovered RNA interference, a fundamental cellular mechanism by which double-stranded RNA silences the activity of genes with matching sequence. In a 1998 paper in Nature, Fire and Mello showed that introducing small amounts of double-stranded RNA into cells could effectively shut down specific target genes by triggering destruction of the corresponding messenger RNA, and that surprisingly few RNA molecules were needed to achieve this effect, indicating that some kind of catalytic amplifying process was involved. This discovery revealed a previously unknown layer of gene regulation active across plants and animals and quickly became both a major research tool for silencing specific genes experimentally and the basis for a new class of RNA-based therapeutics. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Mello for this discovery. Fire earned his doctorate in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983 under Phillip Sharp, worked at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge under Sydney Brenner, spent seventeen years at the Carnegie Institution Department of Embryology, and joined the Stanford University School of Medicine faculty in 2003.