Four 2024 Nobel winners have MIT ties

Acemoglu, a professor at the Institute, has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1993. Johnson, Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2007 to 2008.

Meanwhile, Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and Gary Ruvkun, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, shared the medicine prize for their discovery of microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that help in gene regulation. This key mechanism allows cells with the same chromosomes to develop into cell types with different characteristics and functions.

The foundation for their discoveries was laid by their work on mutant forms of roundworms C. elegans as postdoctoral fellows of MIT in laboratory of Professor H. Robert Horvitz (who will receive the Nobel Prize in 2002). Later, working independently, they showed that a particular roundworm gene produces a very short RNA molecule that binds to the messenger RNA encoding another gene and blocks its translation into protein. Since then, more than 1000 microRNA genes have been found in humans.

In an interview with Journal of Cell BiologyAmbros also credited the contributions of collaborators including his wife, Rosalind “Candy” Lee ’76and postdoc Rhonda Feinbaum.