INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of microRNA and its crucial role in how
multicellular organisms grow and live, the award-giving body said on Monday.The Nobel assembly said in a statement that the laureates
said.Their work helped explain how cells specialise and develop into different types, such as muscle and nerve cells, even though all the
cells in an individual contain the same set of genes and instructions for growing and staying alive.Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel
committee for physiology, said he had reached Ruvkun by phone, waking him up early in the U.S
University of Massachusetts Medical School, while Ruvkun is a professor at Harvard Medical School and also affiliated with Massachusetts
General Hospital in Boston.FIRST OF 2024 NOBEL PRIZESThe winners of the prize for physiology or medicine are selected by the Nobel Assembly
physiology or medicine prize is the first in the crop of Nobels, arguably the most prestigious prizes in science, literature and
humanitarian endeavour, with the remaining five set to be unveiled over the coming days.Created in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and
businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes have been awarded for breakthroughs in science, literature and peace since 1901, while economics is a
later addition.Different institutions award the prizes in the various fields, with Peace being the only one awarded in Oslo rather than
Stockholm, possibly as a result of the political union that existed between the two Nordic countries when Nobel penned his will.Past winners
of the Nobel medicine prize include many famous researchers such as Ivan Pavlov in 1904, most known for his experiments on behaviour using
favourites Katalin Kariko, a Hungarian scientist, and U.S
colleague Drew Weissman, for discoveries that paved the way for COVID-19 vaccines that helped curb the pandemic.Steeped in tradition, the
science, literature and economics prizes are presented to the laureates in a ceremony on Dec
Separate festivities attend the winner of the peace prize in Oslo on the same day.Source: Reuters--Agencies
