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  2. Rich Jorgensen on the RNAi Nobel.

Rich Jorgensen on the RNAi Nobel.

By apalazzo on November 30, 2006.

There was some minor controversy for the RNAi Nobel ... should Rich Jorgensen's have been acknowledged? and the miRNA people?

Here is what Rich Jorgensen has to say (from the latest edition of Science):

I feel that the Nobel committee's decision to focus on the central role of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) was quite appropriate; it was this specific discovery that broke an obscure field wide open and brought it to the attention of all biologists. The publication of RNAi (1) catalyzed new interactions between plant and animal geneticists that led directly to all kinds of discoveries about the mechanisms underlying and related to RNAi. The impact on biological research from understanding that dsRNA is a key intermediate in triggering RNAi has been huge. dsRNA is used as a tool to silence genes in a significant percentage of all papers on eucaryotic biology (for instance, "RNA interference" was mentioned in more than 20% of all research articles published this year in the journal I edit, The Plant Cell, the leading primary research journal in plant biology). Of course, there were also many other very important discoveries in the RNAi field, by researchers working in plants, animals, and fungi, but none of them had the same catalytic impact on biology as did Fire and Mello's key insight and elegant experimentation. The Nobel committee decided to keep the award simple and straightforward for good reason.
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I read Jorgensen's paper and I don't think he or the other plant biologists deserve the nobel prize. True they did make the petunias make antisense and sense strands and observed a wierd phenomena but they did not take their research to another level and actual identify what was going on and what the key player was. They merely made an observation.

Andrew Fire and Mello took it to another level. They specifically injected dsRNAs, observed a gene silencing effect, and attributed it.

This scenario kinda reminds me of the controvery surrounding the Watson and Crick getting the Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA where Rosalind Franklin did some, if not most of the ground breaking work. In that scenario, similar to this RNAi one, the authors who defininitvely concluded the research got the Nobel prize.

Well in the case of Rosalind Franklin, she died before the Nobel was awarded and her coworker Wilkins won. There was some rumbling that her work was not acknowledged in the Nobel lectures that Watson & Crick gave (not sure about Wilkins ...)