This Monday, the Nobel Prize organization signed a message on the social network X: “Congratulations to our 2024 winner Victor Ambros. This morning he celebrated with his colleague and wife Rosalind Lee, who was also the first author of the 1993 study in cell cited by the Nobel Committee. Along with the message, a photo of Ambros and Lee smiling at the camera.
The message has had more than a million views and dozens of comments. Many of them are people who wonder why Lee hasn’t won the Nobel Prize with her husband. Some remembered the case of another Rosalind—Franklin—and the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Since 1901, 227 people have won this award. Only 13 are women. Is the Nobel jury committing an injustice? Everything points to no.
Contrary to what you may think, being the first author of a study does not mean being the most important. Typically, the last signatory is the leader of the research group. The study cited by the Nobel committee includes Lee as first author and Rhonda Feinbaum as second. The study details that both contributed the same amount of work to the study.
The fact that Ambros signed last and was the correspondence investigator makes it clear that he was the one who led the work, explains Pilar Martinresearcher at the National Center for Cardiovascular Research and expert in microRNA. “In science, the corresponding author [el que envía el estudio a la revista y a quien hay que dirigir cualquier pregunta sobre el mismo] He is the one who devised the experiment, the intellectual author of the research. Nobel Prizes are awarded to new ideas for humanity, and in this case it is very clear that Ambros and Ruvkun are responsible,” he considers.
It is not the first time that a Nobel Prize in science comes with controversy. These awards can only be awarded to a maximum of three people, which for many left Spaniard Francis Mojica off the podium in 2020. The two seminal 1993 studies detailing the discovery of microRNAs, one led by Ambros, another by Ruvkun, they had a total of six authors who participated in the experiments, which would already exceed the maximum number of winners. In addition, the committee has taken into account other subsequent studies in which other authors also participated.
For Martín, the controversy caused by Lee’s case is just “noise.” “Biomedical science is not something that one can do alone, it requires a lot of work from many researchers who contribute to the experiments, but who are not the ones who devised the research. “This is how science works, you learn to investigate by doing the experiments that your boss thinks,” he adds.
The case of Rosalind Lee is even more particular, since she has been Ambros’s wife since the time they signed that first paper in 1993, when she was a laboratory assistant. Lee has signed numerous studios with Ambros during his career. It might seem like she has been overshadowed by her husband, although that was not the case. In the specialized microRNA community, Ambros and Ruvkun are largely considered the fathers of the discovery of microRNAs. There are even researchers who have been working in the field for years and do not know Rosalind Lee.
The researcher herself has celebrated the award as a collective triumph. “We felt like we had achieved something,” has explained in an interview at the University of Massachusetts, where he is currently senior researcher within the group led by her husband. “We have contributed to scientific knowledge and that is what all researchers want to do; May our work serve as a pillar for others to discover new things. It is amazing what has now been achieved in the field of microRNA,” he added.
In 2008, Ambros and Ruvkun won the prestigious Lasker Prize for Basic Medical Research alongside David Baulcombe. In his speech, Ambros made a very relevant reasoning about how research is done and who receives the awards. “What I love most about science is that it is an intensely human task,” pointed out. “The success of this work, and that of the individual scientist, derives from the fact that we do it together. We work in small teams, such as [Rosalind] Candy Lee and Rhonda Feinbaum, when they discovered the first microRNA; or when we share our beloved and secret scientific results, as Gary Ruvkun and I did to discover antisense base pairs between microRNAs and their targets; or like when we published our results to make them known to the rest of the world and I was amazed to see another study from 1999 by David Baulcombe’s group that showed the existence of microRNA in plants,” he highlighted.
In that paragraph alone there are direct and indirect allusions to enough scientists to fill the Nobel science podium, possibly for several years.
Bruce Wightmanresearcher at Muhlenberg College (United States) was the first author of the other seminal 1993 study on microRNA, led by Gary Ruvkun. In an email, the researcher once again makes clear the complex network of collaborations behind each Nobel Prize. “Science is a collaborative effort and any project is developed for years with many contributors. This discovery was possible thanks to the work of Marty Chalfie, Bob Horvitz and John Sulston, who won the Nobel Prize for their findings, published since 1981. The scientist highlights that it was a study in Science in 1984, of which Ambros was the first author and Horvitz the last, who made possible the collaboration with Ruvkun that ended up meriting another Nobel Prize. In fact, Ambros believed that he would never be awarded the Nobel Prize, because his disciple Craig Mello had already won it for discovering RNA interference.
The story gets even more complicated. Wightman says his contribution to the discovery of microRNAs “was central.” It was the work of his doctoral thesis, but this in turn depended on the postdoctoral students: Prema Arasu, Thomas Burglin and Ilho Ha, he highlights.
In 1958, the American biologist Joshua Lederberg won the Nobel Prize in Medicine along with two other researchers for their studies of the genetics of bacteria. The jury did not recognize the work of his wife Esther Lederberg, although she worked in the same field and was the intellectual author of part of the investigation. “I understand that people wonder when the boss’s wife contributes to investigations,” Wightman says, “but I don’t think that’s the case with Lee.”
In his original will from 1895, the Swedish Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, wrote that the prize should be received by “the person” who had made the greatest contribution in Physics, Chemistry and Physiology or Medicine the previous year. The three-winner rule was not made explicit until much later, in 1968. Since then, one in three Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry has been shared by three people. The need to restrict the number of winners forces us to remain only “with those who inaugurate a new field and maintain it,” explained Joseph Goldstein, president of the Lasker jury, in 2016. It is a rule that is increasingly incompatible with the way in which science is done.
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