Andrew Fire

Andrew Fire genuinely awes me. Born in Palo Alto, raised in Sunnyvale and trained at Berkeley, he shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering RNA interference, work that revealed how organisms can switch genes off and reshaped modern medicine and drug development from the ground up. The Gairdner and Paul Ehrlich prizes only underline the scale of it. What I find most appealing, though, is how little noise surrounds him. No scandal, no spectacle, just the patient accumulation of careful experiments. To me he embodies the rarest kind of fame, earned by quietly and profoundly changing the world.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Name (English)

Andrew Fire

Name (Japanese)

アンドリュー・ファイアー

Reading

あんどりゅー・ふぁいあー

Born

April 27, 1959 (age 67)

Origin

Palo Alto, California, United States

Occupation

biologist / geneticist / physician / physicist / pathologist

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Taurus / Boar

High school

Fremont High School

University

University of California, Berkeley

Awards & achievements

• 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• 2005 Canada Gairdner International Award
• 2006 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize
• 2004 Dr H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics
• 2005 Massry Prize
• 2004 Rosenstiel Award
• 2002 Meyenburg Prize
• 2002 Genetics Society of America Medal

• Official sitehttps://profiles.stanford.edu/andrew-fire
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew%20Fire
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%83%89%E3%83%AA%E3%83%A5%E3%83%BC%E3%83%BB%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%82%A2%E3%83%BC
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q202152

Tags

• California
• biologist
• geneticist
• physician

Last updated

November 2, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.