The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024
nobelprize.org
nobelprize.org
"In the late 1980s, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were postdoctoral fellows in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002."
So a single MIT lab produced 3 Nobel laureates; I'd say that's impressive. (Noting that the 2 current laureates had moved on to Harvard and Mass Gen when they did the relevant work.)
He was born through an extramarital affair of his father, Swedish biochemist Sune Bergström (1916–2004), who, like his son, became a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (in 1982). Pääbo is his mother's only child; he has via his father's marriage a half-brother (also born in 1955).
Anyone who's had a great mentor knows how impactful they can be on the trajectory of your career just in terms of how much more effective you can be.
This isn't impressive. It's a sign of concentration of power, of nepotism, and of exclusionary policies. It's the usual dirty politics we see all over the place.
How you don't see that as an abuse of power is beyond me. Sometimes HN feels eerily like talking to Trump supporters that rationalize any abuse.
In this case, the discovery of microRNAs ushered in a whole new area of biology and medicine, and led to techniques (easy methods to selectively target and suppress gene expression) that facilitated discoveries in many other areas.
They have many choices at their disposal. And they intentionally choose from only a small narrow pool of potential winners to keep it in the family. That's corruption.
Of course, if your point was "it doesn't matter how deserving the winners are, they're all corrupt" then that's the sort of argument that facts can't counter.
Kudos to him now!
What I love about these announcements is how good they are at explaining the concept. Click the "Press release" or "Advanced information" and get something easily digestible. Also fun to watch the talks the winners hold, they're often good at explaining.
Edit: the individual committees are even not all run by the same institution [0]. The medicine prize committee is run from the Karolinska institute, whereas the physics committee, for example, is run by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
[0] https://www.nobelprize.org/the-nobel-prize-organisation/priz...
Check out Sean Carroll on the subject:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230224123835/https://twitter.c...
miRNA = microRNA
tRNA = transfer RNA
rRNA = ribosomal RNA
siRNA = small interfering RNA
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3500609/
mRNA provides the blueprint for constructing proteins based on the genetic information stored in DNA.
miRNAs are small regulatory RNAs that control gene expression by interacting with mRNA, influencing whether certain proteins are produced or not.
In this specific case, which revolves around a fundamental revision of the old central dogma of DNA replication, mRNA transcription and protein expression, billions of dollars of funding through over a dozen major government funding agencies in the US, Europe and Asia were required, involving hundreds of research groups scattered around the world over a few decades. Ask the following questions for more details:
(1) How much governmental funding in the United States and abroad has been directed to the study of this new model of complex and dynamic miRNA-based regulation of gene expression and function over the past few decades, and what are the main agencies supplying such funding, and to which research universities has most of the funding been directed?
(2) Given the complexity of the problem and the involvement of hundreds of research groups and dozens of national and international funding agencies, why give a Nobel Prize to just a couple of research group heads for this new understanding?
Abolishing the scientific Nobel Prizes entirely makes a lot of sense from this viewpoint.
Because these two were directly responsible for the discovery and the initial understanding of the mechanism of what was going on. The depth and quantity of the resulting research, funding, and all the other streams of new jobs or additional lines of research are follow-on results from the finding, which to me is a metric that highlights the enormity of their achievement and the richly deserved nature of this award.
Conservation of the sequence and temporal expression of let-7 heterochronic regulatory RNA - AE Pasquinelli, BJ Reinhart, F Slack, MQ Martindale, MI Kuroda, B Maller, DC Hayward (Nature, 2000)
Limiting it to three people really doesn't make much sense, and the selection of winning candidates has far more to do with political maneuvering then it does with how scientific discovery works. Similar issues arise in many other Nobel Prize awards, eg the discovery of the mechanism of ribosomal protein synthesis.
It's not about regulatory information.