A life in context
The person behind the prize
Ambros earned his doctorate at MIT and studied the small roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. He later led laboratories at Harvard, Dartmouth and UMass. A question about why a worm’s cells developed at the wrong time led his team to an unexpected kind of genetic instruction.
The contribution
His laboratory found that the lin-4 gene produced a tiny RNA rather than a protein. Sharing results with Gary Ruvkun helped reveal how that RNA controlled another gene.
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.
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