- Person
- Gary Ruvkun
- Lived
- b. 1952
- Field
- Molecular biology
- From
- American
The story
Gary Ruvkun, born into a Jewish family in Berkeley, California, in 1952, took a winding path into science: after college he planted trees with an Oregon cooperative and travelled through Latin America before a stack of Scientific American magazines in Bolivia drew him back to research. As a postdoctoral fellow in H. Robert Horvitz’s laboratory at MIT, he and his colleague Victor Ambros studied two mutant worms, lin-4 and lin-14, in which the timing of development went wrong.
Ambros, by then running his own laboratory at Harvard, found that the lin-4 gene did not make a protein but only a tiny RNA about 22 letters long. Ruvkun, at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, showed that lin-4 did not stop the lin-14 gene’s message from being made but blocked the protein from being produced, and he pinpointed the part of the lin-14 message that was needed. When they compared results, the tiny lin-4 RNA matched that part of the lin-14 message. A small RNA was silencing a gene by pairing with it. They published the discovery in two papers in Cell in 1993, but most scientists thought it was a quirk of worms.
In 2000 Ruvkun’s laboratory found a second microRNA, let-7, and then showed that let-7 is present, with the same sequence, throughout the animal kingdom, including in humans. That discovery turned the worm finding into a general rule of biology. Hundreds of microRNAs were soon found; the human genome is now known to contain more than a thousand microRNA genes, and each can fine-tune many other genes. Ruvkun and Ambros shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
MicroRNAs turned out to be essential for normal development and important in disease. The Nobel committee notes that abnormal microRNA regulation can contribute to cancer, that mutations in microRNA genes cause conditions such as congenital hearing loss and eye and skeletal disorders, and that mutations in DICER1, a protein needed to make microRNAs, cause a rare syndrome that leads to cancers in many organs. MicroRNA patterns are being developed as markers for diagnosing disease and as targets for new RNA-based medicines.
Why it matters
Ruvkun’s microRNA discoveries revealed a universal system of gene control that helps explain cancers and inherited disorders and is opening the way to new RNA-based diagnostics and drugs.
About Gary Ruvkun
Berkeley-born geneticist who co-discovered microRNA, a new layer of gene control found in all complex life, opening paths to new diagnostics and RNA medicines for cancer and genetic disease.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024 NobelPrize.org
- Gary Ruvkun, 2014 Gruber Genetics Prize Gruber Foundation, Yale University
- Gary Ruvkun, 2024 Nobel Prize recipient Mass General Brigham
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.