Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, is a recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that regulate the activities of thousands of genes in plants and animals, including humans. He shares the award with Victor Ambros, Silverman Professor of Natural Science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ambros was a professor at Harvard starting in 1984 until moving to Dartmouth in 1992.
Ruvkun was sleeping when the call came in from the secretary of the Nobel committee.
“The phone rang and we don’t get middle-of-the-night phone calls,” Ruvkun said in an interview shortly after receiving the prize. “We answered it and it was the secretary of the Nobel committee and it sounded real. We’ve received awards for this and it’s always been wonderful. It was great. It’s a big deal.”
Though the prize announcement came at 5:30 a.m., he said he’d already received many phone calls congratulating him.
“There’s a lot of people who get up early to watch these things,” Ruvkun said.
The scientists received the award for the “discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.” The discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms. It is now known that the human genome codes for over 1,000 microRNAs. The discovery by Ruvkun and Ambros revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation. MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.
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