Gary Ruvkun

Massachusetts General Hospital

Gary Ruvkun is a molecular biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Victor Ambros for the discovery of microRNAs and their role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. Ruvkun's pivotal contribution was demonstrating how the lin-4 microRNA acts mechanistically — showing that it represses the lin-14 target gene by binding complementary sequences in the untranslated region of its messenger RNA — and, crucially, discovering let-7, a second microRNA whose sequence is conserved across the entire animal kingdom from worms to humans. The conservation of let-7 transformed microRNAs from a developmental oddity into a recognized, ancient, and universal mode of genetic control, igniting a worldwide research effort. Beyond microRNA biology, Ruvkun has made influential contributions to the genetics of insulin signaling and aging in C. elegans, and he maintains an active interest in astrobiology, having proposed sequencing-based methods to detect extraterrestrial life sharing common ancestry with Earth organisms. His laboratory's sustained NIH support and its position at the intersection of developmental genetics, metabolism, and RNA biology make it a durable account for suppliers of sequencing instruments, model-organism reagents, and bioinformatics services.