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On a drizzly Monday afternoon, clinical pathologist Chin-Lee Wu sits down at an unoccupied desk a few feet away from one of the ӳ����ý’s bustling laboratories and gets ready to examine over 100 slides beneath a microscope. Chin-Lee is a surgical pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital where he specializes in urological cancers, including prostate, kidney, and bladder cancers. For the last three years, he has also served as a consultant pathologist for the ӳ����ý, peering at prepared slides of cancer samples and making sense of the cellular disarray. (See more in the video below.)

Ramnik Xavier calls it “learning from human genetics.” That’s how the senior associate member of the ӳ����ý describes his research building on the soaring number of genes now known to be implicated in two common disorders, Crohn’s disease and type 1 diabetes.

Boston Globe reporter Carolyn Johnson writes on today's about the push to target cancer with new therapies — among many specialists, the piece quotes Todd Golub, director of the ӳ����ý's Cancer Program. Todd and other colleagues discussed the ӳ����ý's approach to cancer research in the new Annual Report:

• Develop a comprehensive catalogue of all mutations in a tumor, in order to understand how genes collaborate to drive the disease;

At the 5th annual RNAi (RNA interference) and miRNA (microRNA) World Congress held recently in Boston, David Root, Director of the RNAi Platform at the ӳ����ý, gave the keynote presentation. I recently caught up with David and asked him to help explain the fundamentals behind RNA interference technology and why it is such a valuable tool for learning about what specific genes do.

Q1. What is the value of studying RNA interference?