Craig C. Mello - Nobel Lecture

It's wonderful to be here today, I would like to start with the most important part, by saying thank you. First of all, I want to thank Andy Fire for being such a tremendous colleague, friend and collaborator going back over the years. Without Andy I definitely wouldn't be here today. I need to thank the University of Massachusetts for providing for my laboratory, for believing in me and for giving me not only a place and money, but great colleagues with whom to pursue my research. Without UMass and the great environment provided for me there, I probably would not be here today. And, of course my family; I'm not going to spend time now thanking them individually, but they know how important they are. I'm going to talk today about C. elegans and the role of RNAi in C. elegans development. This animal is aptly named for its elegant simplicity (Figure 1). Only one millimeter in length and yet capable of produc­ ing 300 progeny in three days by self fertilization. One of the most beautiful things about C. elegans, immediately apparent upon view­ ing it in the microscope, is its transparency. Sydney Brenner re­ cognized the importance of this attribute when deciding what organism to work on. As animals go, C. elegans is relatively simple, having only about a thousand cells in the adult organism. Indeed, the origin and fate of every cell, both in the embryo and adult, has been determined – an amazing accomplishment. At any stage of develop­ ment, you can look at a cell and know where that cell came from, tracing its origin back in time to the first division of the embryo. It's a beautiful system. In fact, the researchers who work in C. elegans have their own lineage. Almost all of us can trace ourselves back to Sydney Brenner, who pioneered the modern genetic analysis of this organism. My Figure 1.