Rice, Charles Moen, 1952–, American virologist, b. Sacramento, Calif., Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1981. Rice was a researcher at the Washington Univ. School of Medicine from 1986 to 2001, when he joined the faculty at Rockefeller Univ. A viral researcher who has studied the makeup of viruses and how to reproduce them in the laboratory, Rice conducted genetic experiments that added important details to the understanding of the hepatitis C virus. He demonstrated that it could cause disease in chimpanzees and developed a specialized strain of the virus that could be grown and studied in the laboratory; the latter led to the development of drugs to treat the disease. In 2020 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Harvey Alter and Michael Houghton for their work on the discovery and identification of the hepatitis C virus.
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