It's champagne for everybody. Phil Zamore pops the cork from a bottle of Montaudon, drenching the brand-new carpet. Everyone in his lab fills a glass to toast the boss. "Unexpected good news," he explains. Zamore, a biochemist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, has just received a national award worth $1 million over five years. "The budget of the lab just tripled."

Zamore is understandably giddy, and it's not just about the money. Zamore's field, RNA interference, or RNAi, is only a few years old, but it has taken the world of biology by storm. "RNAi is the most exciting insight in biology in the past decade or two," says Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp, a biologist at MIT. And Zamore's lab is one of a handful moving the field forward at a dizzying pace. "I think everybody who works in the field feels a bit breathless from the progress," Zamore says.