Illustration by Eric Hanson

Only eight years after their 1998 paper in Nature announced the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi), in which double-stranded RNA is used to silence genes, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello awoke in the wee hours of the morning of October 2 to the news that they were the 2006 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physi­ology or Medicine. Such a short time between discovery and prize often signifies a finding's importance: it took only nine years for Watson and Crick to win the Nobel for discovering the structure of DNA. The Nobel Assembly's confidence in the importance of RNAi is obvious.

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