Albert Lasker
Basic Medical Research Award

Acceptance Remarks by Gary Ruvkun

The discovery of a previously unsuspected civilization of tiny RNAs was the first perfect storm of the genome era. I would like to acknowledge the inspired discoveries of my co-awardees Victor Ambros and David Baulcombe, whom I have now known for most my scientific career. It is important for those interested in medical research to realize that much of the tiny RNA revolution emerged from non-mammalian genetic analysis—from plant biology, from worm genetics, from the fungi, from the protozoa. Much of this research was funded generously over the past decade or two, reflecting well on the wisdom of the many peer review systems, private and public, which support science. It is important to continue to explore the diversity of biology; our next revolutions, scores of them, are likely to emerge from here.

It was Sputnik in 1957 that launched me into science. The ensuing US launches were fully televised and breathlessly reported. Television was a new medium, and unlike today, with the inevitable launch delays, there could be four or five hours of continuous network coverage, with hours of pre-recorded interviews with bowtied, flattop haircut scientists to fill the time. I fondly remember the excitement of Walter Cronkite and Jules Bergman when they interviewed the engineers who designed space capsules or the scientists who described orbital mechanics. The exciting concepts that I learned from television those few dozen mornings from 1961 to 1966 were far more sophisticated than what was being taught in my elementary school and were key elements in shaping me.

I thank my parents for my first microscope at age 5, for my telescope at age 8, for taking me to the Oakland Public Library once a week to check out a dozen books, for teaching me how a steel mill works, for my first ham radio, for their celebration of Berkeley as Athens, for the awe in their voices when they said, "nuclear physicist."

One of the most wonderful dividends of this sort of recognition is that I can interpret aspects of my autobiography, exploring how my past might have helped me come to discoveries. And that there are audiences that I can try to interest in my saga. It is at least possible that being a Jew in Oakland California made me enough of an outsider that I did not neatly fit into any community and escaped a sense of entitlement. And that my kinship with the great Jewish comics of the 50's and 60's fostered a certain irreverance and a warped perspective, and made me funny so that people might gravitate to work with me. It is possible that my undergraduate training in physics taught me not quantitative reasoning but rather how a scientific revolution at its very beginning can be recognized. And that my year working in a tree planting cooperative in Oregon after graduating from college taught me the joys of a crew working together, cooperatively, on a hard problem. And that my year of travel on third class buses from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, with my encounters with thousands of strangers may have trained me in the instantaneous assessment of the others, no doubt helping me to recruit the most interesting and intelligent students and postdocs to my lab.

I arrived at graduate school in 1976, with no idea how science is done. From my fellow graduate students and postdocs at Harvard and MIT, I learned how to eat and breathe science, how to be thrilled with discoveries at the moment of their presentation. From my teachers, Fred Ausubel, Wally Gilbert, and Bob Horvitz, all of whom are here today, I learned something more intangible but key: good taste in picking scientific problems, and by their examples, how to unravel the tangled webs that life has evolved.

So the tribes of my education, my childhood, my lab and my academic environment were uniquely inspiring, supportive, and loads of fun. But my home tribe has been the wellspring of strength and joy. And I am truly grateful to Natasha Staller, and our daughter Victoria for the joyous home life of our little tribe.