In the future in early August in 2001, Victor Ambros gained an electronic mail from an editor at Science, asking him to check two new research the magazine was once taking into consideration publishing. Ten years previous, Ambros and his spouse and lab supervisor, Rosalind Lee, had found out a odd new kind of molecule — a tiny little bit of free-floating genetic code that got here to be referred to as microRNA — throughout the millimeter-long our bodies of C. elegans roundworms.
For lots of the resulting decade, they and others believed that this microRNA was once an evolutionary one-off, a quirk atypical to the lowly C. elegans. Then, in early 2000, a chum and collaborator named Gary Ruvkun discovered some other one, this time in all varieties of animals, together with sea urchins, frogs, fruit flies, and people. Fairly than an oddity of trojan horse biology, those molecules, it gave the impression, had been each historic and in every single place.
Impressed, Ambros and Lee introduced their very own seek, and via spring the next 12 months had unearthed a dozen extra microRNAs. The invention had them using top in the course of the summer time, as they took journeys to their nation space and cheered from the sidelines at their teenage sons’ baseball and football video games. Then got here the e-mail from the editor.
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