Andrew Zachary Fire was born on April 27, 1959. He is an American scientist who teaches and studies diseases and genes at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In 2006, he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Craig C. Mello. They were honored for discovering RNA interference, a process that helps control how genes work. Their research was done at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and shared in a scientific paper in 1998.

Biography

Andrew Z Fire was born in Palo Alto, California, and grew up in Sunnyvale, California, in a Jewish family. He graduated from Fremont High School. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, for his college degree, where he earned a B.A. in mathematics in 1978 at the age of 19. He then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. in biology in 1983 with the guidance of Nobel Prize winner Phillip Sharp, a geneticist.

Fire moved to Cambridge, England, to work as a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow. He joined the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, led by Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner, a biologist.

From 1986 to 2003, Fire worked as a researcher at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Embryology in Baltimore, Maryland. The first research on double-stranded RNA that can stop genes from working was published during his time at the Carnegie Labs. Fire became a part-time professor in the Biology Department at Johns Hopkins University in 1989 and joined the faculty at Stanford University in 2003. Throughout his career, Fire has received research funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Fire is part of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors and the National Center for Biotechnology at the National Institutes of Health.

Nobel Prize

In 2006, Fire and Craig Mello were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research, which was first published in 1998 in the journal Nature. Fire and Mello, along with scientists SiQun Xu, Mary Montgomery, Stephen Kostas, and Sam Driver, discovered that short pieces of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) can stop specific genes from working. This happens because the dsRNA causes the destruction of messenger RNA (mRNA) that has matching sequences. When mRNA is destroyed, it cannot be used to make proteins. Fire and Mello found that dsRNA was more effective at silencing genes than the earlier method using single-stranded RNA. They suggested that only a small number of dsRNA molecules were needed because a process involving chemical reactions might be involved. Later research confirmed this idea.

The Nobel Prize citation, given by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, stated: "This year's Nobel Laureates have discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information." The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that Nick Hastie, director of the Medical Research Council’s Human Genetics Unit, described the research as having wide-ranging importance.

Awards and honors

Fire has received the following awards and honors: (By chronological year of award)

• Meyenburg Prize in 2002
• Shared the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology with Craig Mello in 2003
• Shared the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences from Rockefeller University with Craig Mello, Thomas Tuschl, and David Baulcombe in 2003
• Elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004
• Shared the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Medical Research from Brandeis University with Victor Ambros, Craig Mello, and Gary Ruvkun in 2005
• Shared the Gairdner Foundation International Award with Craig Mello in 2005
• Shared the Massry Prize with Craig Mello and David Baulcombe in 2005
• Shared the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize with Craig Mello in 2006
• Shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Craig Mello in 2006