Victor Ambros & Gary Ruvkun Awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine for microRNA Discovery 🎉

Victor Ambros & Gary Ruvkun Awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine for microRNA Discovery 🎉

Guess who's making headlines in the science world? 🧬 Two U.S. scientists, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, have snagged the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine! 🏆 They're being celebrated for their groundbreaking discovery of microRNA and its role in gene regulation. Talk about leveling up in the science game! 🚀

The Nobel Assembly praised their findings as \"proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.\" Pretty epic, right? 🌟

Fun fact: Ambros did the prize-winning research at Harvard University but now teaches at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. As for Ruvkun, he's a professor at Harvard Medical School and is linked with the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Looks like Boston is the place to be for biotech breakthroughs! 🏙️

Thomas Perlmann, the secretary of the Nobel Committee, shared that he woke up Ruvkun with the big news. Imagine getting that call early in the morning! 📞🎉 He hadn't reached Ambros yet, but we're sure he's just as thrilled.

Back in the late '80s, Ambros and Ruvkun were postdocs in Robert Horvitz's lab (another Nobel Prize winner from 2002 🧠). They studied tiny roundworms and discovered how microRNAs control organ growth. At first, people thought this was just a worm thing 🪱, but Ruvkun's team later showed that this mechanism has been around in all animals for over 500 million years! That's some Jurassic-level stuff! 🦕

So what's the big deal with microRNA? It's all about how our genes get translated into proteins—the building blocks of life. Think of microRNA as the DJ remixing the original track 🎧, tweaking how genes express themselves.

This award kicks off the Nobel Prize season, the most prestigious recognition in science! Stay tuned for more announcements in the coming days. 🗓️

The Nobel Prizes have been honoring amazing contributions to science, literature, and peace since 1901, thanks to Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite (talk about explosive ideas! 💥).