Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
The scientists won the award on Monday for their discovery of microRNA and its role in how genes are regulated, solving a decades-old mystery, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said.
If gene regulation goes awry, it can lead to serious diseases such as cancer, diabetes or auto-immune illnesses.
“Their groundbreaking discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans,” the jury said.
Ruvkun said he was shocked to win the prestigious prize.
“It’s quite a sea change. I’ve won other awards in the past, but those were very quiet in comparison,” the 72-year-old professor at Harvard Medical School told AFP after receiving the news in a call from the prize committee in the early hours of Monday.
“There’s already been TV crews and photographers, and 300 email messages from friends!” he said, as his dog barked at the front door with more reporters arriving.
Ruvkun shared that he and Ambros are “buddies” and had a congratulatory video call that morning.
“We just FaceTimed to high-five. We’ve been friends for years.”
Ruvkun told Swedish public radio SR that he looked forward to the Nobel gala banquet on December 10 in Stockholm, where the laureates will receive their prizes from the hands of Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf.
“It’s a party. You don’t think of a bunch of scientists as party animals but we really are,” he said.
Ruvkun told AFP the pair would be “celebrating like crazy,” praising Ambros as “always positive and wonderful.”
The Nobel committee failed to reach Ambros by telephone to give him the news. He heard it instead from an SR reporter who called.
“Wow, that’s incredible! I didn’t know that,” the 70-year-old professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School said, adding, “Good. Wonderful.”
Collaborating but working separately, Ruvkun and Ambros researched a one-millimetre roundworm, C. elegans, to determine why cell mutations occurred and when.
They discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation, which in turn allows each cell to select only relevant instructions.
Their findings were published in two articles in 1993.
“The seminal discovery of microRNA has introduced a new and unexpected mechanism of gene regulation,” Thomas Perlmann, secretary general of the Nobel Assembly, told reporters.
“MicroRNAs are important for our understanding of embryological development, normal cell physiology and diseases such as cancer,” he said.
The Nobel Prize consists of a diploma, a gold medal and a $1 million cheque to be shared by the pair.
