Nobel Prize in Medicine 2024

Like every year around this time, the Nobel Prize organization announces, for each category separately, the people it has decided to award. It is customary to formalize the awarding of the prizes on December 10, coinciding with the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the scientist and inventor who in his will allocated a good part of his fortune to finance the prizes that bear his name. But the public announcement of the concession is usually made well in advance.

This year, the Nobel Prize in Medicine is awarded jointly to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

The information stored in our chromosomes can be compared to an instruction manual for all the cells in our body. Every cell contains the same chromosomes, so every cell contains exactly the same set of genes and exactly the same set of instructions. However, different types of cells, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very different characteristics. How do these differences arise? The answer lies in gene regulation, which allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions. This ensures that only the correct set of genes are active in each cell type.

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were interested in how different cell types develop. They discovered microRNAs, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation. His revolutionary discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans. It is now known that the human genome encodes more than a thousand microRNAs. Their surprising discovery revealed a whole new dimension of gene regulation. MicroRNAs are demonstrating their fundamental importance for the development and functioning of organisms.

On the left, Victor Ambros. On the right, Gary Ruvkun. (Drawings: Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach)

Victor Ambros was born in 1953 in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. He currently works at the Chan Medical School of the University of Massachusetts in the United States.

Gary Ruvkun was born in 1952 in Berkeley, California, United States. He currently works at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, as well as at Harvard University Medical School, also in the American city of Boston. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)