Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an investigator at the Massachusetts General Hospital, has received the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of micro RNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that regulate the activities of thousands of genes in plants and animals, including humans. As potent regulators of gene activity and of the expression of proteins made by these genes, microRNAs have profound implications for disease and health. Their discovery in the 1990s has sparked a revolution in RNA medicine.
Ruvkun shares the prize with his collaborator Victor Ambros of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ambros and Ruvkun discovered the first RNA genes in animals and demonstrated how RNA can turn off genes whose activities are crucial for development.
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