Talk:Craig Cameron Mello
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I have removed the following: "Craig Mello is the first Nobel Prize winner scientist associated with University of Massachusetts; which has existed under shadows of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology." This grammatically incorrect statement reads as a swipe at UMass and it isn't even true -- Mello is the first person to win a Nobel while on the UMass faculty, but other laureates have been associated with the university. For instance Russell Alan Hulse, who won the physics prize in 1993, received his Ph.D. from UMass in 1975. Hulse shared his prize with Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr., who was an astronomy professor at UMass for several years. The excised text wouldn't even belong in an article about UMass (or about any other school in Massachusetts, since the same could be said about all of them), let alone one about an individual professor.
Removal of inappropriate addition
I have removed the following text that had been recently added by Xuanwu, since it is an inappropriate and subjective editorialization in this article on Prof. Mello's achievement:
"Mello and Fire's research was directly based on the work of a team lead by two Indian scientists, Dr. Utpal Bhadra and Manika Pal Bhadra. Together with a third researcher, Dr. Jim Birchler, they described gene silencing in animals in a Cell article published in 1997, a year before Fire and Mello's landmark paper.[3] According to Dr. Bhadra, "The work of Andrew and Craig is based on the research of my team from University of Missouri." [4]"
The Bhadra et al. Cell paper makes an interesting demonstration in an animal system (Drosophila) of the phenomenon of cosuppression, as it was known at the time, albeit without providing much mechnastic insight into the process responsible. This phenomenon had previously been observed only in plants and fungi, but although Bhadra et al. showed that it existed in animals, the phenomenon remained puzzling and unexplained.
The real breakthrough in this field was provided by Fire and Mello in their 1998 Nature paper. Working in C. elegans, they made the crucial demonstrations that (1) gene silencing dependend on duplex RNA containing sense and antisense strands homologous to the target mRNA; (2) gene silencing mediated by dsRNA was specific and could be used as a general tool for gene silencing; (3) dsRNA-mediated gene silencing appeared to be catalytic, suggesting the existence of an endogenous enzymatic mechanism for this process.
The work of Fire and Mello was performed in an entirely different system from that of Bhadra et al. and was really entirely unrelated, other than the fact that the effect described by Bhadra et al. may have had a similar basis. In fact, the Fire and Mello paper was a direct extension of several earleir papers on RNA-mediated gene silncing from Fire's group. If the Bhadra et al. observations were indeed a manifestation of RNAi, their data suggesting a dependence on polycomb group proteins is curious, since their is no known role for this protein family in RNAi.
Ve ri tas 06:09, 5 October 2006 (UTC)Ve ri tas
