Talk:Andrew Fire

His work
There is really no need to go in to such detail about RNAi in this article IMHO. That should be reserved for the RNAi article. All we really need to do is to explain what the work was and why it was important. Furthermore, some of it seeems rather poorly written. For example the article appears to suggest scientists previously thought RNA was merely a byproduct. While the role of RNA in regulating genes is only beginning to be understood, and this work was pivotal in realising that role may exist, I think few would have stated RNA was merely a byproduct. It sounds to me a bit like whoever wrote this might not understand how we get from DNA to protein at all if they were to suggest RNA was thought of as merely a 'byproduct'. Alternatively, perhaps this was just poorly written. Finally the whole article is in dire need of sources. Especially when we express POVs such as this:


 * The fact that their work had been recognised by the Nobel committee just eight years after it was published indicated just how important it had been. It is very unusual for a piece of work to completely revolutionise the whole way we think about biological processes and regulation, but this has opened up a whole new field in biology.

N.B. I'm not saying I disagree with the above but we need a source if we want to say it Nil Einne 14:56, 2 October 2006 (UTC)


 * i agree - it strays from it's topic of the discoverer. Goldfinger820 20:55, 2 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Much of the text regarding the Nobel work seems to have been lifted verbatim from the articles in the External References section. It just needs a little massaging.  I do think that something of the relevance of the work should be mentioned.
 * Alex68677 22:43, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

what links here
There seems to be a deliberate policy of linking the article about any Nobelist to all the other nobelists from the same time period. All WP really needs is a chronological table, which WP has, in several versions. I assume the links are done programmatically from the templates? Can someone explain any possible use of this?DGG 01:29, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Removal of inappropriate addition
I have removed the following text that had been recently added by Xuanwu, since it is an inappropriate and subjective editorialization in this article on Prof. Mello's achievement:

"Mello and Fire's research was directly based on the work of a team lead by two Indian scientists, Dr. Utpal Bhadra and Manika Pal Bhadra. Together with a third researcher, Dr. Jim Birchler, they described gene silencing in animals in a Cell article published in 1997, a year before Fire and Mello's landmark paper.[3] According to Dr. Bhadra, "The work of Andrew and Craig is based on the research of my team from University of Missouri." [4]"

The Bhadra et al. 1997 Cell paper makes an interesting demonstration in an animal system (Drosophila) of the phenomenon of cosuppression, as it was known at the time, albeit without providing much mechanistic insight into the process responsible. This phenomenon had previously been observed only in plants and fungi, but although Bhadra et al. showed that it existed in animals, the phenomenon remained puzzling and unexplained.

The real breakthrough in this field was provided by Fire and Mello in their 1998 Nature paper. Working in C. elegans, they made the crucial demonstrations that (1) gene silencing depended on duplex RNA containing sense and antisense strands homologous to the target mRNA; (2) gene silencing mediated by dsRNA was specific and could be used as a general tool for gene silencing; (3) dsRNA-mediated gene silencing appeared to be catalytic, suggesting the existence of an endogenous enzymatic mechanism for this process.

The work of Fire and Mello was performed in an entirely different system from that of Bhadra et al. and was really entirely unrelated, other than the fact that the effect described by Bhadra et al. may have had a similar basis. In fact, the Fire and Mello paper was a direct extension of several earleir papers on RNA-mediated gene silncing from Fire's group. If the Bhadra et al. observations were indeed a manifestation of RNAi, their data suggesting a dependence on polycomb group proteins is curious, since their is no known role for this protein family in RNAi.

Ve ri tas 06:15, 5 October 2006 (UTC)Ve ri tas

Improvement
This biography of Andrew Fire should be improved. I have add {{Infobox Scientist and other information. More information should be included. Masterpiece2000 (talk) 13:23, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

External links modified
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External links modified
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