Kenneth A. Howard
Editor

2013

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology was awarded to Andrew Fire and David Mello for their 1998 discovery of double-stranded RNA-mediated gene silencing by the process of RNA interference (RNAi). The capability to control and study cellular gene expression has opened up completely new research areas, shed exciting new light on existing fields, and provided researches with an unprecedented tool for investigating functional genomics and the potential to harness the RNAi mechanism as a potent therapeutic.