Craig C. Mello

Craig C. Mello (born Oct. 18, 1960, New Haven, Conn., U.S.) is an American scientist, who was a corecipient, with Andrew Z. Fire, of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2006 for discovering RNA interference (RNAi), a mechanism that regulates gene activity.

Mello grew up in northern Virginia, and, as a young boy, he developed an intense curiosity in the living world. His curiosity was largely influenced by his father, James Mello, a paleontologist who had served as the associate director of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Mello was intrigued by fundamental concepts such as evolution. He felt that these concepts encouraged humans to ask questions about the world around them, a belief that led to his rejection of religion at a young age. Mello attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, studying biochemistry and molecular biology and receiving a B.S. degree in 1982. He began his graduate studies in biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he worked in the laboratory of American molecular biologist David Hirsh, who was investigating the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. While conducting research in Hirsh’s lab, Mello was introduced to American molecular biologist Dan Stinchcomb. When Stinchcomb decided to move to Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., to start his own research laboratory, Mello decided to follow him. At Harvard Mello became deeply involved in research on C. elegans, and his studies led him to American scientist Andrew Z. Fire, who was working at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Baltimore, Md. Both Mello and Fire were working to find a way to insert DNA into C. elegans, a process known as DNA transformation. After exchanging ideas and elaborating on one another’s experiments, they successfully developed a procedure for DNA transformation in nematodes. In 1990, following the completion of his thesis, C. elegans DNA Transformation, Mello graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. in biology.

Mello worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash., from 1990 to 1994. He continued studying C. elegans, though his focus had shifted to identifying genes involved in regulating nematode development. In 1994 Mello joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He became interested in an RNA injection technique used to silence genes. Silencing genes in C. elegans enabled Mello to identify the functions of the genes he had discovered while working in Seattle. He soon found that some nematode embryos that had been injected with RNA to silence certain genes were able to transmit the silencing effect to their offspring. Mello and Fire worked in collaboration to uncover the cellular mechanism driving this active silencing phenomenon and discovered that the genes were being silenced by double-stranded RNA. Known as RNAi, this mechanism regulates gene activity and helps defend against viral infection. In 1998 they published their findings, for which they later received the Nobel Prize. RNAi has proved a valuable research tool, enabling scientists to block genes in order to uncover the basic functions and roles of genes in disease. RNAi can also be used to develop new treatments for a number of diseases, including AIDS, cancer, and hepatitis. Following the RNAi publication, Mello focused his research on applying the silencing technique to the study of embryonic cell differentiation in C. elegans. In 2000 Mello was awarded the title of Howard Hughes Medical Investigator because of his significant contributions to science.

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