Profile of Gary Ruvkun

Abstract

Awash in the faint glow of a fluorescent lamp, a pair of serpentine nematode worms lie on a Petri plate, their see-through bodies magnified 100-fold by one of several microscopes arrayed in a darkened bay in National Academy of Sciences member Gary Ruvkun’s laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. While one of the worms wiggles its way around the plate, the other shows no signs of life, its midsection ruptured and its innards strewn asunder. A filter slides into place, and the worms are bathed in a dull green haze. The wiggling worm has a beacon of nerve cells in its head, the ganglia lit up by a genetic trick that has rescued the worm from death; its neighbor wears no such beacon. The worms were deprived of a tiny RNA molecule, called a microRNA, which helps shepherd them through their development. Through genetic engineering, Ruvkun’s graduate student has rescued the wiggling worm by returning its microRNA along with a gene for the green fluorescent beacon. Through such experiments aimed at unraveling the genetics of development, molecular biologist Ruvkun helped unearth a world of microRNAs—snippets of RNA that play a range of regulatory roles—in living cells. Today, microRNAs, which represent the smallest genes known to biologists, have become an intense focus of basic research, their study bearing implications for diseases such as diabetes, schizophrenia, and cancer. Gary Ruvkun. Expression of a microRNA rescued the glowing nematode ( Left ) from death ( Right ). Image courtesy of Zhen Shi (Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA). Emblematic of the Sputnik era that spurred the scientific bent of many researchers, Ruvkun’s childhood interest in science began during the 1960 launch of the first US communications satellite Echo, which could be seen as it inched across the night skies over the San Francisco Bay area, where he grew up. …