00:00The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in
00:07Physiology or Medicine jointly to Victor Ambrose and Gary Ravkun for the discovery of microRNA
00:16and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation. I'm calling on Victor Ambrose.
00:21Gary and I knew we're studying interesting genes probably that are components of some
00:35kind of developmental clock, right? And so we were just really curious about what kind
00:40of gene products would be mediating this kind of activity. The significance of this discovery of
00:46microRNAs is that it allowed us to be aware of a very complex and nuanced layer of regulation
01:01whereby genes in ourselves talk to each other and coordinate their activity. Honestly, this was not
01:09something that I expected, to be quite honest. And so, because in my opinion, the Nobel Prize
01:16to Mello and Fire encompassed all these phenomena that we study. There are a lot of awards, but the
01:24Nobel is in its own class in terms of how much attention it gets. So I've, I don't know, I've
01:31probably gotten 10 different awards over the last 20 years. There's never been a press conference
01:37like this or TV cameras or, you know, nothing like this. So it's a completely different world.
01:44And the fact of the matter is, there's about 500,000 molecular biologists in the world now,
01:50and there's only 20,000 genes approximately, and that's spread out over every organism. So
01:57the chances that somebody has worked on a gene you bump into is quite high, but they don't know
02:04that you're working on it, and you don't know they're working on it. And so there's plenty of
02:08chances for surprises. And the surprises are what keep you young in science. And so I am constantly
02:15surprised.
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