Four 2024 Nobel winners have MIT ties

Acemoglu is an institute professor and an MIT faculty member since 1993. Chief Economist.

Meanwhile, Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan School of Medicine, and Gary Ruvkun, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, shared the medicine prize for their discovery of microRNA. This key mechanism allows cells with identical chromosomes to develop into cell types with different characteristics and functions.

Their work on roundworm mutants laid the foundation for their discovery Nematodes As a postdoc at MIT laboratory Research results of Professor H. Robert Horvitz (2002 Nobel Prize winner). Later, working independently, they discovered that a gene in the roundworm produces a very short RNA molecule that binds to the messenger RNA encoding a different gene and prevents its translation into protein. Since then, more than 1,000 microRNA genes have been discovered in humans.

in a Interview Journal of Cell BiologyAmbrose also praised the contributions of collaborators, including his wife, Rosalind “Candy” Lee ’76and postdoc Rhonda Vanbaum.