Gary Ruvkun

Origins and early life

Gary Bruce Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, on 26 March 1952, into a family he describes as Russian Jewish: on both sides his grandparents, who had come to America as immigrants, spoke Yiddish at home. His father, who had studied at Berkeley, built steel mills and cement plants across Latin America for Kaiser Engineers, and the son took his own Berkeley degree, in biophysics, in 1973.

Work and career

He then planted trees in Oregon, travelled through Latin America and ground his own telescope mirror in San Francisco before starting graduate school at Harvard in 1976. He took his doctorate there in 1982, then worked until 1985 at MIT in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, where he and Victor Ambros studied the genes that time the development of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. In his own laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School from 1985, he showed that a gene called lin-14 was silenced not when its messenger RNA was made but when it was turned into protein, through a stretch of that RNA.

Ambros had found that the gene lin-4 made only a tiny RNA; comparing results, they saw that it matched that stretch and blocked the protein, and their two papers in Cell in 1993 described the first microRNA. The finding was long taken for an oddity of worms, until in 2000 his group found a second microRNA, let-7, conserved across the animal kingdom, humans included; more than a thousand human genes are now known to encode microRNAs.

Recognition

His laboratory also showed that an insulin-like signalling pathway governs metabolism and lifespan in the worm, and he shared the Lasker Award in 2008 and the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2014. In 2024 he and Ambros shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in equal halves, “for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation”; he remains professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.