Their marriage, scientific partnership resulted in a Nobel — for him

One day in early August in 2001, Victor Ambros obtained an e-mail from an editor at Science, asking him to evaluation two new research the journal was contemplating publishing. Ten years earlier, Ambros and his spouse and lab supervisor, Rosalind Lee, had found a wierd new type of molecule — a tiny little bit of free-floating genetic code that got here to be referred to as microRNA — contained in the millimeter-long our bodies of C. elegans roundworms.

For many of the ensuing decade, they and others believed that this microRNA was an evolutionary one-off, a quirk peculiar to the lowly C. elegans. Then, in early 2000, a pal and collaborator named Gary Ruvkun discovered one other one, this time in all types of animals, together with sea urchins, frogs, fruit flies, and people. Quite than an oddity of worm biology, these molecules, it appeared, had been each historic and in all places.

Impressed, Ambros and Lee launched their very own search, and by spring the next 12 months had unearthed a dozen extra microRNAs. The invention had them driving excessive by the summer season, as they took journeys to their nation home and cheered from the sidelines at their teenage sons’ baseball and soccer video games. Then got here the e-mail from the editor.