Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 9 October 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/449642a
News
Biologists claim Nobel prize with a knock-out
Architects of mutant mice are rewarded for their work.
The architects of a technique that has allowed biologists to identify the function of genes easily have been rewarded for their efforts with this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The technique allows researchers to generate 'knock-out' mice -mutant strains in which specific genes are disabled.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email webadmin@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
How many examples exist of good, valid scientific papers which have been and are still rejected or discriminated because of presumed (or real) differences between mouse and human species? How to explain this discrepancy? Thanks, Antonio Brunetti, MD, PhD Univ. of Catanzaro "Magna Græcia", Catanzaro Italy
Is there any standard by which the results found with knockout mice can be evaluated with a human perspective?
Last year’s awarding of a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to discoverers of RNAi caused a surge of complaints because not only RNAi is a reinvention of RNA interference wheel but also a tiny aspect of the broad scope discovery on epigeneics. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to researcher extending the discovery of transgenic mice with the creation of knock-out in embryonic cells but the pioneer(s) making precedent greater discovery of transgenic mice were noticed but not awarded. Why this most respected scientific award went so often to trivial and late scientific extensions but left behind grand earlier breakthroughs under-appreciated? (full-length free at http://im1.biz/albums/userpics/10001/TW2007V2N2A12_Nobel2007Med.pdf)
Congratulations to Mario R. Capecchi, Ph.D., Sir Martin J. Evans, Ph.D., DSc., FRS, and Oliver Smithies, D.Phil., FRS, all former recipients of the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology, on sharing this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr. Capecchi and Dr. Smithies shared the 2005 March of Dimes Prize, and Sir Martin was a co-recipient of the 1999 March of Dimes Prize. We are proud to have honored their achievements in gene targeting. The March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology has been awarded annually since 1996 to investigators whose research has profoundly advanced the science that underlies the understanding of birth defects. Five former March of Dimes Prize recipients now have gone on to win a Nobel Prize. The previous ones were Sydney Brenner, D.Phil., FRS, and H. Robert Horvitz, Ph.D., who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries on genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death. For more information, visit the March of Dimes Web site at marchofdimes.com.
In the table of contents, there's a link to the PDF version of this article. It doesn't reach it. What did you do with the PDF version?
This years award is indeed well deserved. But it is a bit too much to go about knocking out every mouse gene. It is O.K. so long as it stops at the mouse but how justified are we in extending it to humans ? Prof S.L.N.Rao
It is true that transgenic mice creation was the initiation but expanding on the gained understanding, knock outs brought too many robust end point clarity at the cause-effect scenario. Often sparks are ignored and the large blazes drwas attention. Indeed knock-out concept was novel and brought out vast gene function information that dwarfed the transgenic creation.
Hearty congrats. But then all our efforts are with hardware and not software of the organism. An organism is a natural biocomputer with hardware and software. Hardware is the chemical structures and software is the biological program stored on the chromosome as we store our programs and data on our computer disc. The program is invisible or intangible agreeing with the view of Wilhelm Johannsen who first proposed the term gene and who cautioned that gene is not particulate. What we do in genetics is just changing the hardware and get a different phenotype mistaking hardware (DNA is the hardware for protein synthesis)for software. For more details on computer concept read the book: The Computer Universe published by Adam Publishers, New Delhi. Also read: The Great Gene Fiasco by the same publisher.
Hello - online news editor here. We have fixed the broken pdf for this article. You can find it on the nature table of contents, here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/index.html Apologies for the delay!
so many congratulations to Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for this great achievement. one thing i donot understand that how is it decided the time to give the prize. prize for RNAi went to very early after the discovery and this is after 27 years. indians should take inspiration from this and should do the good science and increase the knowledge power of the country
Hearty congratulation's for getting the most presious award. I have few doubts about this experiment tin this exp only one gene at a time is knocked out with the stem cell but there might be other chemical substances or proteins in the natural cell itself which would be acting on other genes nd making it inactive or knocking out atleast for some time so in this case how can the result be developed, how can one know the function of the specific gene which is deliberately knocked out from the other gene which is knoceked out by natural process.
Congratulations to the great scientists!! Homologous recombination has definately revolutionalized our understanding of genome and its function.. It has been used in nearly every molecular genetic lab aiming to investigate the bilogical function of human,animal,plant,microbial genes... Great Effort, guys!!
Two sides of the medal: In 1991 I had lunch with a professor a few days before his homozygous K.O. mice were finally born - and surprisingly - alive and very healthy, but therefore they represented an ideal tool for the study of prion diseases - and he had needed someone to analyze those future mice by simple light microscopy. At that time, I was too much of a pure scientist (and more interested in molecular biology than old-fashioned histology) to jump as only second author on any expected Nature- and Cell Papers. I decided to find my 'own' K.O. project, including all the neccessary steps from gene cloning, design of the K.O. constructs up to culture of mouse embryonic stem cells. This was very fascinating work to do, but like probably tens of thousands of young scientists worldwide I became just burned in three years of my life by lack of support at the right time - and I failed to find enough ES-cell clones to use them for one of the final steps, the blastocyst injection. This Nobel prize should be dedicated to all the young scientists - successful or not - who risked to work in the wrong lab with not enough ressources to succeed in time with the K.O. of the gene of their interest. Hopefully, those 'unsuccessfull' K.O. students and postdocs found another way - although they supported the success of the technique in one way or another.