This probably doesn’t come as any great surprise. The winners of this year’s Nobel prize for physiology/medicine are Craig Mello of UMass Medical School in Worcester and Andrew Fire of Stanford for their discovery of RNA interference, the process of gene silencing now widely exploited as a research tool in biology and drug development labs worldwide.

Perhaps what is surprising is how quickly this discovery, first published in 1998, was recognized with a Nobel, according to this article from news@nature.com. With research in the biological sciences becoming so competitive and fast-paced, will the Nobel prizes break with tradition and start recognizing achievements made fewer than 10 years earlier?