Skip to Content by Leigh MacMillan | Posted on Thursday, Jan.
31, 2013 — 9:29 AM In a wide-ranging lecture that moved from
plants to nematode worms to human leukemia, Nobel laureate
Andrew Fire, Ph.D., outlined his vision for a genomics-based
understanding of how organisms respond to novel information.
Biological responses to foreign information involve an “immune
response” — mediated in some organisms by RNA and in others by
proteins and cells, said Fire, professor of Pathology and
Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Fire and
Craig Mello, Ph.D., were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of RNA interference —
an RNA-based immune response that allows cells to selectively
silence certain genes, for example those of a pathogenic virus.
Immune responses like RNA interference can be “positive” and
directed against a pathogen, or they can be “negative” and
directed against the organism itself (generating autoimmune
disorders in humans). “We live at this interfac