A life in context
The person behind the prize
Ruvkun received his doctorate at Harvard and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT before establishing his own laboratory in 1985. Like Victor Ambros, he used a tiny worm to investigate fundamental biology. Their complementary experiments uncovered a previously unrecognised layer of gene regulation.
The contribution
He showed that lin-4 regulated the production of protein from lin-14 messenger RNA. Later work on let-7 demonstrated that this kind of small-RNA control was shared far beyond one worm species.
The idea in plain language
Many cells share the same DNA but do different jobs. Part of the explanation lies in controlling when genetic instructions are used. Ambros and Ruvkun studied worms whose development happened at the wrong time.
Read the full award story ↗