Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of microRNA, tiny biological molecules that tell the cells in our body what kind of cell to be by turning on and off certain genes.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Ambros about the discovery that led to his Nobel prize and find out what he’s researching now. And we hear about how a deeper understanding of microRNA is opening up new avenues for potential treatment of cancers and other diseases.

Today, Ambros is a professor of molecular medicine and the Silverman Chair in Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School in the US. But the research that won him a Nobel prize was published more than 30 years ago in 1993, when he had just established his own research lab at Harvard University.

Ambros was trying to understand the way cells get the right instructions from DNA during their development. To do this, he was studying mutations in an........

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