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STOCKHOLM - This year’s Nobel Medicine Prize laureates, US researchers Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, said Monday they were shocked to receive the prestigious award just eight years after making the discovery for which they were honoured.

The Nobel science prizes usually go to research conducted decades ago and which has stood the test of time, but Fire and Mello made their discovery in 1998 when they identified how malfunctioning genes are naturally shut down, a breakthrough that could lead to an era of new therapies to reverse disease.

“I was very surprised, mainly because I’m fairly young and I thought maybe there were so many other discoveries worthy of a Nobel prize,” Craig Mello told Swedish Radio.

Mello, born in 1960, is a professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts.

“I just assumed it was something that might come several years from now,” he said, adding: “It’s still sinking in I think, I can hardly believe it.”

Meanwhile his co-laureate Fire, who is a professor of pathology and genetics at Stanford University in California, said he thought his life would remain unchanged even though he had many years ahead of him as a Nobel laureate.

“I’m still the same person. My goals are still fairly simple goals, of research, science and teaching and family, and I don’t expect that to change,” he said.

Fire, born in 1959, said he was “very happy” to be honoured.

“At first of course one doesn’t believe it. It could be a dream or a mistake or something like that. I guess it’s not,” he told the radio.

“It’s wonderful … to have positive attention,” he said.

Both laureates, who were woken up in the middle of the night by a telephone call from the Nobel committee in Stockholm, said they would attend the gala ceremony in the Swedish capital on December 10 to pick up their prize from the hands of King Carl XVI Gustaf.

The two will share the prize sum of 10 million kronor (1.37 million dollars, 1.07 million euros).

Asked what he would do with his half of the prize money, Mello said: “I hadn’t really thought about that yet. I’m sure we’ll think of something.”