UMass Medical School's Craig Mello elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Nobel Laureate joins prestigious membership

WORCESTER, Mass.—The American Academy of Arts & Sciences today announced that it has elected University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Craig C. Mello, PhD, to its membership, which includes some 200 Nobel laureates, more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners and national and worldwide leaders drawn from the sciences, the arts and humanities, business, public affairs and the nonprofit sector. The new class of 190 Fellows and 22 Foreign Honorary Members—hailing from 20 states and 15 countries—were announced today and will be inducted into the Academy on October 11 at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the Academy has elected as members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth.

“The Medical School congratulates Dr. Mello on his election to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences, which has rightly and richly recognized his seminal contributions to advancing our understanding of developmental gene regulation,” said Michael F. Collins, MD, interim chancellor. “Dr. Mello joins an institution whose members are some of the most prominent intellectual and creative forces in this country and throughout the world, and our medical school is privileged that he does so as a colleague and friend.”

Mello was recognized by the Academy for his work in the discovery of RNA interference, for which he and his colleague Andrew Fire, PhD, were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1998, Mello and Fire, who was then at the Carnegie Institution of Washington DC and is now at Stanford University, published research findings in Nature demonstrating that a particular form of ribonucleic acid—RNA, the cellular material responsible for the transmission of genetic information—can silence targeted genes. This process, RNAi offers astounding potential for understanding and manipulating the cellular basis of human disease, and is now the state-of-the-art method by which scientists can “knock down” the expression of specific genes to thus define the biological functions of those genes. Just as important has been the finding that RNAi is a normal process of genetic regulation that takes place during development, opening a new window on developmental gene regulation. RNAi has swept through laboratories around the world, changing the way many biomedical researchers work. Outside UMMS laboratories, companies at the forefront of pharmaceutical innovation are using RNAi technology to aid in their development of treatments for disease. At UMMS, researchers are taking full advantage of RNAi technology to speed investigation into a variety of diseases such as diabetes, cancer, ALS and HIV/AIDS.