American molecular biologist Victor R. Ambros, PhD, who, along with Gary Bruce Ruvkun, achieved one of the most esteemed honors in the scientific community, was born in 1953 in Hanover, New Hampshire. He grew up on a farm with seven siblings during his childhood.
„I was the first scientist in my family. My dad was an immigrant from Poland. He came to the United States shortly after World War II and met my mom. They got married, moved to a farm in Vermont, and began to cultivate the land. My siblings and I grew up surrounded by cows and pigs, helping to plant and harvest corn and engage in similar farming tasks” - Ambros recalled in the Journal of Cell Biology in 2013 as the Silverman Professor of Natural Science at UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, MA.
According to UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, MA - the institution with which this year’s Nobel Prize winner in medicine - Victor Ambros, has long been associated - he earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from MIT and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 1983.
During his graduate studies with Nobel laureate David Baltimore, he researched the poliovirus genome, while his postdoctoral work with Nobel laureate H. Robert Horvitz focused on developmental timing in C. elegans. Ambros began his faculty career at Harvard in 1984 and later moved to Dartmouth Medical School in 1992.
The Nobel Prize Committee recognized him, along with California researcher Gary Bruce Ruvkun, for their discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.
“This year’s Nobel Prize honors two scientists for their discovery of a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated,” explained the official statement.
Victor Ambros visited his university yesterday with his wife, Rosalind "Candy" Lee, to celebrate his success with colleagues.
Today, the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced.
The Nobel Prize in physics: John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton
According to the Polish state news agency PAP, another Nobel laureate this year has Polish ancestry.
Born in 1933 in Chicago, John Hopfield is one of six children of Polish physicist John Joseph Hopfield. His mother, Helen Hopfield, was also a physicist. He earned his PhD in 1958 from Cornell University and is currently a professor at Princeton University.
Source: PAP/umassmed.edu/X/@NobelPrize
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