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Measured against this standard, HHMI began the season in a particularly dynamic and eventful fashion. I'd even call it joyful.
After nearly seven years of thinking and planning—concurrent with four solid years of construction—the Institute opened its Janelia Farm Research Campus. With laboratories and offices still filled with moving boxes and equipment crates, Director Gerry Rubin and his colleagues hosted their first meeting of HHMI investigators immediately after Labor Day. Everyone lived to tell the tale—as the saying goes—and the Janelia team immediately began readying the campus for the biennial gathering of HHMI's International Research Scholars, who came from every continent save Antarctica. It's fair to say that these inaugural meetings will be remembered for years to come, both for their scientific content and for the palpable sense of excitement generated by Janelia Farm.
The week of activities that marked the official opening of Janelia Farm began on an extraordinary note with the announcement of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Craig Mello, an HHMI investigator at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, received the early-morning phone call from Sweden along with his colleague, Andrew Fire, who was at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore when the two collaborated. Their discovery, called RNA interference (RNAi), is a normal regulatory mechanism that allows cells to shut down individual genes during embryonic development. What really made RNAi famous was its utility as a research tool. In less than a decade, it became widely used to selectively silence specific genes in plants and animals. Several companies are exploring its potential in new therapeutic approaches. Because most human ailments, from viral infections to cancer and immunological diseases, involve specific RNA molecules, the list of possible applications is long.
Photo: Paul Fetters
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