On Monday morning, Andrew Fire was the man of the hour. Camera shutters clicked and questions flew from Bay Area reporters who wanted to know more about the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Two days later, photographers were focused on another professor at the School of Medicine: Roger Kornberg, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The first week of October, when the Nobels are announced each year, was a particularly busy one on the Farm. And everyone was quick to point out the connections between the laureates’ work. “Andy Fire’s research dealt with the inhibition of gene expression,” Provost John Etchemendy, PhD ’82, noted at the press conference for Kornberg on October 4. “And, of course, before there’s inhibition, there has to be a mechanism for expression—the research Roger Kornberg has been honored for.”
A professor of pathology and of genetics, Fire was part of a team of researchers who discovered double-stranded, aberrant RNA molecules that can turn off specific genes in animal cells. He and Craig C. Mello of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who shares the Nobel prize, co-authored a paper in Nature in 1998 that explained how they had replicated the natural on-off mechanism by reproducing the double-stranded RNA in a test tube and then putting that material into a cell. The silencing process, called RNA interference, or RNAi, is today a widely used research tool that has shown promise in gene therapies for cholesterol management, HIV, cancer and hepatitis.
Kornberg, PhD ’72, a professor of structural biology, received the Nobel in chemistry for his work in understanding how the genetic blueprint of DNA is converted into the protein-producing instructions of RNA, a process called transcription. Applications of his molecular research are found in the design of antibiotics. An understanding of how transcription goes awry can help explain birth defects, cancer and other conditions.
Kornberg described the history of his research as “truly a Stanford story,” which began with his graduate work in the department of chemistry in 1967. He returned as a faculty member in 1978 and began research at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, a division of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. It also is a family story. His father, Arthur Kornberg, a professor emeritus of biochemistry who was in the audience at the Clark Center auditorium, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 for studies about how genetic information is transferred from one DNA molecule to another. And Roger Kornberg noted that his “closest collaborator” has been his wife, Yahli Lorch, associate professor of structural biology.
Fire’s Stanford history is also long, but interrupted. He arrived on the Farm on April 27, 1959, when he was born at Stanford Hospital. He joined the Stanford faculty in 2003. A longtime researcher at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Fire did his undergraduate work in mathematics across the Bay. “I applied to only two places for undergraduate training,” he explained at the press conference. “One of them was the University of California at Berkeley, and one was Stanford. And I went to the one place where I got in.”
Both Nobelists spoke about the importance of basic research conducted at the university level. The main application of his Nobel-winning work, Fire said, “hasn’t been any miraculous new medicine.” Instead, “It’s been understanding.”
