The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet has awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun.
They received the prestigious award for their groundbreaking discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation, a significant mechanism in biological development.
In 1993, Ambros and Ruvkun published their pivotal findings, revealing an unexpected level of gene regulation that has since been shown to be conserved across evolution. Their work, initially conducted on the small worm C elegans, identified a new class of tiny RNA molecules—microRNAs—that play a critical role in controlling gene expression.
This discovery has proven essential for understanding how multicellular organisms, including humans, develop and function, marking a major advancement in the field of molecular biology.