Craig Mello

Craig Mello is an American biologist who, with Andrew Fire, discovered RNA interference, showing that small snippets of double-stranded RNA can silence a specific gene by causing the destruction of that gene messenger RNA before it can be translated into protein. The two researchers published this finding in 1998 based on work conducted partly at the Carnegie Institution for Science and partly at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and the discovery revealed an entirely new layer of gene regulation that operates broadly across the animal and plant kingdoms. RNA interference rapidly became one of the most widely used tools in molecular biology for experimentally turning off individual genes, and it later formed the basis for an emerging class of RNA-based drugs. Mello received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Fire for this work. He has been a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School Program in Molecular Medicine and RNA Therapeutics Institute, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.