Three Americans Win Noble Prize for Medicine
Two Americans and a Brit won the noble prize for medicine for their
work in gene targeting, a process using homologous recombination to
turn off a single gene. When used in mice it is known as using
"knock-out mice", as that gene has been knocked out. Having a single
gene, and only that gene, turned off helps to understand how that gene
functions.
The two Americans are Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies. Sir
Martin J. Evans is British.
To give an idea of how important this technique is today, a search on
pub med, the medical research literature database, for "knock-out
mice" gives you over 46,820 research papers.
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