Andrew Fire

Origins and early life

Andrew Zachary Fire was born in Palo Alto, California, on 27 April 1959 and raised in Sunnyvale in a Jewish family. He left Fremont High School for Berkeley, took a degree in mathematics at nineteen, and went to MIT for a doctorate in biology under Phillip Sharp, finishing in 1983; he then spent his postdoctoral years in Cambridge in Sydney Brenner's group at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and from 1986 worked at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore.

Work and career

Biologists had been injecting RNA into worms to switch genes off and getting results that made no sense: the RNA matching the gene worked, but so did RNA of the opposite sequence, which should have done nothing. In 1998 Fire and Craig Mello showed why. What silenced the gene was neither strand alone but double-stranded RNA, and a very little of it — far less than one molecule per cell — which meant the cell was not being flooded but instructed: something inside it was reading the double strand as a template and hunting down every matching messenger RNA to destroy it.

RNA interference turned out to be an ancient defence against viruses, present in plants, worms and people, and it handed biology a switch for turning off any chosen gene, and medicine a new class of drugs. Fire joined Stanford in 2003 and shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Mello, eight years after the paper.