The one thing I like about RNAi is just biology, is just the recognition that there is something, which is ancient because it is shared between fungi and plants and animals, which apparently is there for a good reason, and is strongly conserved. We don’t quite know what it is. So we’re really in the romantic phase, we’re still trying to figure out what the hell is going on. So that is what I like about it the most. Of course, the reason most people are excited about it is something else, to use it as a tool.
The immediate application of RNAi as a tool is in studying gene function. In knocking down genes at a grand scale. Genome wide RNAi, first done in worms but now it can be done in mammalian cells as well. Only in the third place I would say is the application to try and use RNAi to try and tune down disease genes and all that. We’ll have to see whether that will work, potentially of course because it is so specific you can really target it to a specific gene because they were talking about a short while ago you can even be a little specific.
There have been studies where you could turn down tune down the mutated version of an oncogene but not the wild type version. So that’s heaven, Hershey Heaven. That’s Hershey Heaven—the way you know what you want to do and you know the work, you know the importance, of course, there is this minor problem here and that is the delivery problem and we will have to see whether that can be solved.