JeanLuc - stock.adobe.com
CV NEWS FEED // The Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their groundbreaking discovery of microRNA, a key mechanism in regulating gene activity, according to an October 7 report from the Times of Israel.
The Nobel Assembly said that the Ambros and Ruvkun discovery is “fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function,” according to the report.
The report shared that the scientists’ collaboration and research was conducted at prominent institutions, with Ruvkun at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he serves as a professor of genetics, and Ambros as a professor of natural science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
Both laureates have unique ties to their cultural and religious roots. Ruvkun, who is Jewish, won Israel’s prestigious Dan David Prize in 2011. Both Ambros and Ruvkun won the Wolf Prize in 2014.
The Times of Israel shared that Ambros’s father, who passed away in 2014, was a Catholic who was sent to a Nazi forced labor camp in World War II.
Ambros reflected on his father’s intelligence and resilience in a 2010 interview, describing him as a “brilliant man” who faced significant adversity due to the war.
“My dad is someone whom I admire enormously,” Ambros said in the interview.
Ambros revealed that his father was born in Poland, where his education was abruptly interrupted when schools closed at the onset of World War II. Captured by the Germans, he spent the majority of the war as a forced laborer, enduring a significant lack of education from the ages of 15 to 19.
After being liberated by the American army, Ambros’s father taught himself English after gaining access to many books while working as an aide to American officers who had headquarters in what had been the mansions of German elites.
“I remember from a very young age being very conscious of pleasing my dad because of the contrast between what I felt I had, which were all sorts of opportunities, and the opportunities that he missed,” Ambros said in the interview, noting that his father played a very influential role in his youth and adulthood.
