Nobel Committee Secretary General Thomas Perlmann speaks to the media in front of a picture of this year’s laureates Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun during the announcement of the Nobel Prize in medicine winners.  Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

The 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to US scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their work on the discovery of microRNA, a molecule that governs how cells in the body function.

Their research revealed how genes, which contain the instruction manual for life, give rise to different types of cells within the human body, a process known as gene regulation.

The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honor, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, in Sweden on Monday. It praised the “groundbreaking discovery,” which the committee said “revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation.”

The discovery of gene regulation by microRNA – a family of molecules that helps cells control the sort of proteins they make that has been at work for hundreds of millions of years – was the result of decades of work by Ambros, a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

“Their discovery… is of fundamental importance to understand how cells work, and thus how organisms develop,” said Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University. “This finding was groundbreaking, and has affected more or less all fields of biology and medicine,” he told CNN via email.

Congratulations to Professors Ambros and Ruvkun!

Tony

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