STOCKHOLM, Oct 2: Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello won the 2006 Nobel prize for medicine on Monday for their groundbreaking discovery of how to “silence” genes, which has opened up potential new paths to treating disease.

Fire and Mello’s discoveries offer “exciting possibilities” for use in gene technology, said the prize-giving body, the Nobel Assembly of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute.

“It’s amazing. It just hasn’t sunk in yet,” Mello told Reuters from his home in Massachusetts after learning that he would share the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.37 million) with Fire.

Fire, 47, and Mello, 45, showed through experiments with nematode worms that a particular form of ribonucleic acid, or RNA – the cellular material that transmits genetic information – can “silence” or switch off targeted genes in a process known as RNA interference (RNAi).

They published their findings in 1998. This technology has become a hot area of research for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, who view it as a promising new way to tackle a range of conditions.

“I had thought that it might be possible, but I am only 45 so I thought it might happen in 10 or 20 years,” Mello said, adding the two may give some of the money to charity. The Nobel science prizes are usually given for work done decades earlier.—Reuters