US scientists win physics, medicine Nobels
04 Oct 2006
Mumbai: American scientists John Mather and George Smoot have won the 2006 Nobel prize for physics for work that helped shed light on the infancy of the universe, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. The award is worth 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.37 million). The duo won the prize for discovering the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which offered insights into the origin of the universe, galaxies and stars, the Academy said.
Two US geneticists who discovered a way to silence individual genes also share £724,337 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.
Andrew Fire, 47, a former Cambridge post-doctoral fellow who is now at Stanford University, and Craig Mello, 45, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, were awarded the prize for discovering RNA interference (RNAi), a tool that scientists hope will lead to new treatments for HIV and cancer.
Their publication in the journal Nature in 1998 described how strands of genetic material called RNA could be used to block the activity of selected genes. This led to a flurry of tests to assess its usefulness in treating serious medical conditions, including Huntingdon's, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
The
Nobel committee at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm
said the pair had "discovered a fundamental mechanism
for controlling the flow of genetic information".
