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5 Things to Know About Gary Ruvkun, PhD, 2024 Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine

7 minute read

While we’re not (yet) experts on the complex genetic research of Gary Ruvkun, PhD, we have learned a lot about the 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology since the award was announced in October.

Ruvkun, an investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and a professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, received the Nobel along with Victor Ambros, PhD, of the UMass Chan Medical School, for their role in identifying microRNAs and defining their role in gene regulation.

Gary Ruvkun receiving his Nobel Prize from H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at Konserthuset Stockholm on 10 December 2024. © Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Nanaka Adachi Gary Ruvkun receiving his Nobel Prize from H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at Konserthuset Stockholm on 10 December 2024. © Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Nanaka Adachi

Here are five things to know about Dr. Ruvkun and his unique research journey.

  1. Reading Scientific American in Bolivia sparked his interest to attend graduate school

After graduating from college in the early 1970s, Ruvkun was not sure what was next. Traveling had always been a passion, so he took time off to travel through the Pacific Northwest and then to Latin America.

Little did he know this journey would lead him to attend graduate school at Harvard and the start of a distinguished scientific career.

“From age 21 to 24, my career was not a direct arrow to science,” Ruvkun said. “After college, I lived in my van and planted trees in the Pacific Northwest for almost a year. Then the following year I traveled in second-class buses, in hammocks hanging on the deck of a sort of riverboat bus down 1,000 miles of the Amazon river, and on more buses all the way to Tierra del Fuego, and then onto the Andes,” Ruvkun said.

“But then after six months of travel, when I was in Cochabamba, Bolivia, I was bored for a day with travel. So, I spent a day reading Scientific American, then a monthly magazine read by the general public but written by major scientists (it is no longer like this today), and it was really a good day. And I said to myself, ‘You know what? Maybe I'll go to graduate school.’’’

  1. Traveling through Latin America taught him many lessons — and gave him some great stories to tell

An individual smiling and holding two mobile phones up to is ears.
Credits: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Ruvkun credits the time he spent traveling on buses in Latin America with teaching him several valuable lessons, such as how to get to know new people you meet on the road, both travelers and people who live in these countries, to connect with local people along the way.

Ruvkun spoke Spanish borderline fluently by the end of the trip and he can still communicate in Spanish “somewhere south of fluently,” he said.

“I am amused by much around me, and I like telling a good story and I like laughing with friends,” he said. "There's a lot of things that happen when you're traveling for a year in Latin America. So, I accumulated about 500 excellent stories to amuse my friends and students.”

"You don't tend to think of scientists as performers, but there is a performance aspect to everything in life.” he added. “And if you are a bit of an entertainer and a raconteur, you'll do better than if you're a real snooze."

  1. It took time to understand the significance of microRNA

Dr. Gary Ruvkun circa 1990s.

Ruvkun started collaborating with Ambros while they were postdocs in the same lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and they continued to collaborate after taking positions at MGH and UMass Chan Medical School respectively.

Their first studies about microRNA and their role in C. elegans worms were published in the early 1990s, but the full implications of their findings—and if those findings were also applicable to humans—were not immediately clear.

But in 2000 Ruvkun discovered the second miRNA, let-7, and demonstrated that it is perfectly conserved in humans.

Since then, the field has exploded with over 176,000 studies on microRNAs. Researchers now know that microRNAs play a role in gene regulation all multicellular organisms, from plants to people.

The explosion of the field came as a pleasant surprise to Ruvkun and Ambros. “We were young faculty members trying to be successful, and so we weren't thinking, ‘ This is going to win a Nobel Prize,’” Ruvkun recalled.

“We were just thinking that it was a really interesting finding. As the field exploded, which was just a joy to be a part of, there was a sense that this is the sort of field, the sort of sea change that gets awards and things. But that took a long time and was an unbelievable pleasure to participate in.”

  1. A microscopic worm played a huge role in making it all happen

Dr. Ruvkun at a mentees' dissertation.

At first glance, it may not seem like humans have a lot in common with a microscopic nematode worm called C. elegans, but this small creature has had a big role in our understanding of human biology.

The small, transparent worms are easy to cultivate in the lab and have enough genetic similarities with humans to make them an ideal model system to explore the function of individual genes.

It was in C. elegans worms that Ruvkun and Ambros first discovered microRNAs and their role in gene regulation.

“The way genetics becomes an art form is by what you decide what to look for. Not all changes are equally interesting, so you have to decide what change you think would be [most] interesting,” Ruvkun said.

“And in our case, it was about how translation of proteins is regulated. What's the process by which they get regulated? We discovered that these microRNAs do that, and we work in many different dimensions in this organism [C. elegans], because they’re very efficient gene discovery machines.”

  1. Research is a team effort

The Ruvkun Lab circa 2010s.

Ruvkun took time during his celebratory press conference to thank all the members of his lab who have contributed to his research over the years.

“It adds up to about a hundred people over a 40-year period—PhDs and postdocs and grad students,” he said. “And often I’m not telling them where to go, they’re telling me where to go."

Collaborations with other molecular biologists, both at MGH and beyond, also played a key role in investigating the role of newly discovered genes.

“The fact of the matter is there's about 500,000 molecular biologists in the world now, and there's only 20,000 genes,” he said. “The chances that somebody has already worked on a gene you bump into is quite high, but they don't know that you're working on it, and you don't know they're working on it.

“So, there are plenty of chances for surprises, and the surprises are what keep you young in science.”

Bonus questions

Credits: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

What’s your idea of a perfect Sunday?

A very slow day, playing fetch with our dog and making French toast and omelets with our daughter at home.

How would your colleagues describe you?

Entertaining, which is something I take pride in. And theatrical.

Tell us a fun fact about yourself.

I buy tomatillos so often that I actually know their PLU number is 4801. This often impresses the checkout people at Whole Foods. And it is evidence of my highly specialized cooking repertoire as well.