Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun awarded with 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine

This year's medicine winners were awarded the prize for "the discovery of microRNAs and their role in post-transcriptional gene regulation."

This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine winners figured out what makes a nerve cell a nerve and how a muscle cell knows it needs to make muscle.

Every cell in our body has the same genetic material. The DNA strands look the same in every cell nucleus. All the genes are there, but not all of them are functional. The genes that code for specific muscles are turned off in nerve cells.

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered that a small molecule called microRNA activates the right genes when needed in a cell.

This function was essential for life on Earth to leap from single-celled to multicellular organisms.

The Nobel Prize winners made groundbreaking discoveries by studying the roundworm C. elegans. Despite being only a millimetre long, this worm has many specialized cell types in higher animals.

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun made their discoveries separately, but they contacted each other and were able to compare their groundbreaking findings. They published their results in 1993, but the research community's interest was lukewarm. Many thought this mechanism might be specific to the tiny C. elegans and irrelevant to larger organisms.

In 2000, Gary Ruvkun’s research group showed that the same mechanism exists for a gene that is common throughout the animal kingdom and also in humans. Future Nobel laureates later made their big breakthroughs.