Two scientists have been award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of microRNA. Victor Ambros, professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, received the prize for revealing how microRNAs turn genes on and off.
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00:00The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in
00:07Physiology or Medicine jointly to Victor Ambrose and Gary Ravkun for the discovery of microRNA
00:16and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. I'm calling on Victor Ambrose.
00:21Gary and I knew we're studying interesting genes probably that are components of some
00:35kind of developmental clock, right? And so we were just really curious about what kind
00:40of gene products would be mediating this kind of activity. The significance of this discovery of
00:46microRNAs is that it allowed us to be aware of a very complex and nuanced layer of regulation
01:01whereby genes in ourselves talk to each other and coordinate their activity. Honestly, this was not
01:09something that I expected, to be quite honest. And so, because in my opinion, the Nobel Prize
01:16to Mello and Fire encompassed all these phenomena that we study. There are a lot of awards, but the
01:24Nobel is in its own class in terms of how much attention it gets. So I've, I don't know, I've
01:31probably gotten 10 different awards over the last 20 years. There's never been a press conference
01:37like this or TV cameras or, you know, nothing like this. So it's a completely different world.
01:44And the fact of the matter is, there's about 500,000 molecular biologists in the world now,
01:50and there's only 20,000 genes approximately, and that's spread out over every organism. So
01:57the chances that somebody has worked on a gene you bump into is quite high, but they don't know
02:04that you're working on it, and you don't know they're working on it. And so there's plenty of
02:08chances for surprises. And the surprises are what keep you young in science. And so I am constantly
02:15surprised.