UMass Medical School's Craig Mello elected to American Academy of Arts an...( WORCESTER Mass.The American Academy ...)

WORCESTER, Mass.The American Academy of Arts & Sciences today announced that it has elected University of Massachusetts Medical Schools Craig C. Mello, PhD, to its membership, which includes some 200 Nobel laureates, more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners and national and worldwide leaders drawn from the sciences, the arts and humanities, business, public affairs and the nonprofit sector. The new class of 190 Fellows and 22 Foreign Honorary Membershailing from 20 states and 15 countrieswere announced today and will be inducted into the Academy on October 11 at the Academys headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the Academy has elected as members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth.

The Medical School congratulates Dr. Mello on his election to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences, which has rightly and richly recognized his seminal contributions to advancing our understanding of developmental gene regulation, said Michael F. Collins, MD, interim chancellor. Dr. Mello joins an institution whose members are some of the most prominent intellectual and creative forces in this country and throughout the world, and our medical school is privileged that he does so as a colleague and friend.

Mello was recognized by the Academy for his work in the discovery of RNA interference, for which he and his colleague Andrew Fire, PhD, were awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1998, Mello and Fire, who was then at the Carnegie Institution of Washington DC and is now at Stanford University, published research findings in Nature demonstrating that a particular form of ribonucleic acidRNA, the cellular material respo
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