Mello, Craig Cameron (1950– )

US geneticist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with US geneticist Andrew Z Fire in 2006 for their discovery of RNA interference, or gene silencing, a fundamental control mechanism in gene expression.

Mello and Fire made their discovery by studying muscle gene expression in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Cells produce messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules to express the muscle gene allowing it to function. They found that two known types of RNA, sense and antisense, could be combined to form a new type of double stranded RNA molecule. The researchers found that injecting double stranded RNA prevented the muscle gene functioning, effectively silencing the gene. This process was called RNA interference or RNAi. Further research showed that RNAi destroyed mRNA where previously the process was thought to only mask the mRNA molecule.

Mello was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was awarded his PhD in Biology by Harvard University in 1990. He joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS), Worcester, in 1994, where he currently holds the position of Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Program in Molecular Medicine. Mello is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UMMS, a position he has held since 2000. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, US in 2005.