As part of the GRC Grant Series: Bridging Life- and Social Sciences the nobel laureate Craig C. Mello speaks about the topic of Developmental Biology.
Dr Mello completed his BSc from Brown university, and did his PhD in the lab of Dr Dan Stinchcomb at Harvard University in 1990, after which he was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. James Price at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre. He started independent research in 1994 where he started to look at specific gene silencing in C elegans embryos. Together with Andrew Fire from the Carnegie institute in Washington, he published a paper in Nature in 1998 entitled ''Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans'' describing silencing of genes by introduction of double stranded RNA in worms. This paper led to numerous awards for Drs. Fire and Mello including the coveted Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 2006. His lab today at the University of Massachusetts Medical School is divided into embryogenesis and RNA interference in Celegans.