The Sunnyvale Sun

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Nobel Prize winner enjoyed math and music as a child

By ERIN HUSSEY

When new Nobel Laureate in medicine Dr. Andrew Fire's family moved to Sunnyvale in the late 1950s, the city was very different. Farms outnumbered coffee shops, children played outdoors instead of with video games and the talk of the town wasn't microchips, but fruit.

His mother, who for privacy reasons prefers to be known only as Mrs. Fire, said, "It wasn't the Silicon Valley. It was the Valley of the Heart's Delight."

She recalled how in the spring, people would drive down from San Francisco to see the fruit blossoms. Palo Alto was known for its apricots, Sunnyvale for its cherries and Santa Clara for its prunes. In fact, one of the reasons the Fires bought their home in Sunnyvale was because it was surrounded by cherry orchards.

"When I was very, very young, I remember waking up early in the morning and hearing people singing in Spanish while they were picking fruit from the orchards a few blocks away," Andrew Fire said. When he was a bit older, he had the opportunity to meet some of the workers and their families.

"I heard that some of the churches were offering tutoring to the children, and someone asked me from the neighborhood," said his mother. "I brought Andy with me, and he was delighted to go and very interested."

Perhaps this was one of the experiences that helped shape the person Fire is today.

Fremont High School mathematics teacher Richard Steffen recalls the humility with which Fire accepted the Nobel Prize, a reflection of the math-focused student he once was.

"He didn't think he was brilliant. He thought that other people were more brilliant than he was. He was really humble and self-effacing, and that's what I remember besides the brilliance," Steffen said.

Fire also attended Hollenbeck Elementary (currently Challenger) School, and Mango Junior High, now Sunnyvale Middle School.

"Since he was a little boy he was interested in math and numbers, but not exclusively," his mom recalls. "One of the best things in Sunnyvale schools was its music education." Both Fire and his older sister Jennifer were involved in the school's music program. Fire played the cello in a string quartet in high school and again with various groups as he traveled to London and elsewhere to conduct scientific research.

"I think it helped him meet people," his mother said.

In high school, Fire said he also had a lot of fun with the math and chess clubs. "Contest problems are very different than problems you would find in a textbook," Steffen explained. "They throw new situations at students, so they have to be very creative. And you know his research is on the frontier, so it kind of fits right in there."

Today, Fire is a professor in the Department of Pathology and Genetics at Stanford University of Medicine. His parents, who still live in the same Sunnyvale home they bought in the '50s, are delighted to have their children and grandchildren nearby.

"I think both of our children had very nice childhoods in Sunnyvale," Mrs. Fire said. "They had really good friends and a sense of safety."

Her son, along with his research partner Craig C. Mello of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, received the Nobel Prize in medicine for their 1998 research discovering a way to silence specific genes. This revolutionary finding could soon fight illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and many others. The process is called RNA interference and occurs in plants, animals and humans.

For more information on Dr. Andrew Fire's research or the Nobel Prize, visit http://nobelprize.org.