From the release:<p>"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."<p>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.)
I remember seeing a talk by Gary Ruvkun years ago at UC San Diego. He was complaining about how he got rejected from UCSD med school and just about every other med school he applied to.<p>Kudos to him now!
Second year in a row for mRNA, interesting.<p>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.
Nobel Prizes in the modern era are pretty misleading when it comes to the public's understanding of how scientific research and discovery is done in practice.<p>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:<p>(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?<p>(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?<p>Abolishing the scientific Nobel Prizes entirely makes a lot of sense from this viewpoint.