Harvard, UMass researchers honored for microRNA discovery

Two Massachusetts scientists are being honored for their work with tiny stretches of RNA that can silence genes.

Victor Ambros (left) of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Gary Ruvkun of Harvard Medical School, along with David Baulcombe of the University of Cambridge in England, will share one of nine Franklin Institute Awards.

The institute, which prides itself on anticipating Nobel Prize recognition in science, singled out these three researchers for their discovery in 1993 that small strands of RNA called microRNAs could turn off genes that produce proteins inside cells.

Craig Mello, also of UMass, and Andrew Fire, then of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in medicine for their discovery of RNA interference through gene silencing by double-stranded RNA. Their landmark paper was published in 1998. On the day the prize was announced, Mello said work by Ambros and others with microRNAs also deserved a prize, perhaps the Nobel in chemistry.

By 1999 Ambros, Ruvkun, and Baulcombe had expanded their earlier work on microRNAs in worms and plants to other animals, including humans, showing the mechanism's importance throughout life.

Ambros was an undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral student in biology at MIT, before joining the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 1985. He moved to Dartmouth in 1992 but was lured to UMass by Mello, who called Ambros his mentor when they both were at Harvard.

Ruvkun earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley and his doctorate from Harvard, both in biophysics. He was a post-doc at Harvard before joining the medical school faculty in 1985, where he worked with Ambros.

The three scientists will receive their awards next month at a ceremony in Philadelphia.