A few days after Ambros won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he chatted about his early life, collaborative work and advice for aspiring scientists.

Published October 14, 2024 at 1:09 p.m.

Victor Ambros , cowinner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, spent his formative years on a dairy farm in Hartland, Vt.

The Nobel laureate has many connections to the Upper Valley: He was born in Hanover, N.H.; grew up on the family farm in Hartland; and graduated from Woodstock Union High School before earning both his bachelor’s and doctorate degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked as a professor at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine from 1992 to 2001.

On October 7, Ambros and his colleague Gary Ruvkun were awarded the prize for their discovery of microRNA, tiny molecules that play a key role in gene regulation and could lead to significant breakthroughs in medical treatments, including cancer.

He and Ruvkun, while working in separate labs in the 1990s, studied how a gene called lin-4 interacts with the lin-14 gene in nematodes, microscopic worms commonly used in research as model organisms. They found that the lin-4 gene produces tiny RNA molecules that bind to the lin-14 mRNA, inhibiting its expression. The discovery reveals how microRNA can regulate gene expression, opening new avenues for research in biology and medicine.

Now a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, the 70-year-old still spends time in Hanover, where he and his wife, Candy Lee, have a house.

What was it like growing up on a farm, and how did it influence you?

I learned how to be a do-it-yourselfer, and that's something that's been part of who I am throughout my career. I like to say sometimes: If I'm in a room with 100 scientists, I may be the only one in the room who actually knows how to milk a cow by hand. My parents, they were basically subsistence farmers. They grew all the food for us. We had pork, beef and eggs from the farm. The idea of self-sufficiency and do-it-yourself, that was part of what we experienced growing up.

What happened to the family farm? Is it still around?

Yeah, my mom and dad passed away about a decade ago. The farm was sold to a family that set up a bed-and-breakfast there. It's pretty cool. It’s Fat Sheep Farm & Cabins . It's kind of cool to go on Facebook and see postings and say, Oh, I know that scene!

You’ve said building a telescope as a kid sparked your interest in science. Can you talk about that and any other formative experiences?

I can't really remember deciding to be a scientist. I always wanted to be, for some reason. There were a few books that my mom had on the shelf, like the biography of Clyde Tombaugh , who discovered Pluto. He was a farm guy, and he built his own telescope. I think I emulated that kind of story. We had some books that said how to make a telescope. It just felt like, Wow, you can really do this. And I'm sure that gave me a lot of confidence, right? Hey, I made a telescope, and it works.

Do you have any standout memories from your time at Woodstock Union High School?

One of the main memories is, it's winter, and Suicide Six [now the Saskadena Six Ski Area ] is just a quick drive from the high school. So high school gets out at 3 p.m., and we would rush over there to try to get a couple runs in before the place closed. Some of my fellow students would find ways to get over there during gym class. But I never actually took the leap into juvenile delinquency.

I remember wonderful teachers, but high school is really difficult, right? Looking back now, I’ve started to realize how difficult it was for everybody back then, particularly women. I'm really fortunate that things rolled out OK for me — and not to my credit. I was really fortunate to have the parents I had. School was good, I got accepted to a good college, and so on. And then you encounter people at college that really help you. That happened over and over in my career. I think of myself and my career in terms of improbability. All of this is so improbable, right? You can point to so many people, so many times and in so many places, who were critical in helping me: teachers and mentors, professors, colleagues, and other students.

It’s been reported that your admissions essay for MIT was just six words : “I want to be a scientist.” Is there a story behind why that was your essay?

I was an arrogant idiot. No, actually, that was calculated. I figured, the poor folks at the other end are reading hundreds of essays, right? Thousands of essays, my God. And so I wanted it to be something that they wouldn't get bogged down [in]. It wouldn't look like everybody else's essays. I said, This is it . I mean, I want to be a scientist . There’s nothing more I can say. Read this, and then go on to the next essay in your file. And I figured maybe it'll work; maybe it won't. And apparently it did.

I can tell you a story about this, though. Do you have time for a two-minute story?

Yes!

Part of the admissions process is, you do an interview with a local alumnus. There was a man in Lebanon who was an MIT alumnus, and they assigned me him. I went over there. It was at night and with a stranger. I didn’t know how to do an interview and what to say. He talked most of the time. He free-associated about MIT and starting a business, stuff like that. After a while, I'm sure I must have said a few things, and then we left.

A few weeks later, I get a thing from MIT admissions that says your application is complete, except we have not received the report from your interviewer. I called the guy up, and he said something like, ‘Who, Ambros? Oh, I goofed. OK, I'll fix that.’ I realized, Oh, my God, he forgot. He doesn't remember who I was . I figured he obviously felt bad, and he made something up. He probably said, ‘Ambros is some kind of genius. You gotta take him.’ So actually, honestly, I think that's why I got into MIT.

At MIT, you met Gary Ruvkun, with whom you share the Nobel Prize. What’s your relationship with Gary, and why did you decide to collaborate on this research rather than compete?

The scientific relationship that Gary and I have, I think it's pretty interesting and worth emphasizing. It's not a traditional collaboration. It's certainly not a rivalry, where, let's say, two labs arrived at the same finding independently, they were racing, and then they crossed the finish line together, so they both have to get first place. It was very different.

We had been postdocs together in Bob Horvitz’s lab at MIT. When we started our first labs, it was natural to try to divide it up. The plan was, we would compare information when we made some progress. The idea would be OK, once you find the DNA sequence of lin-14, and we find the DNA sequence of lin-4, hopefully we'll be able to put something together . And that's exactly what we did.

It's important to draw people's attention to this third way that science works. There's competition, which drives people to do the best they can. Try to become as good or even better than that person they admire. That's that beautiful human instinct, right? The other one is collaboration, where we work as a team, and we divide things up from the beginning. That's collaboration, and that's unbelievably powerful. But then there's this other thing, where we share information. We go to meetings and talk about unpublished work. We walk down the hall, grab a colleague and say, "What do you think of this?" We go to seminars by students and postdocs in our department, and they share unpublished stuff, and we toss ideas at them.

In my case, Gary and I shared sequence information and said, "Let's do a phone call and talk about what we've seen." We were able to say, "Wow, the lin-4 microRNA is complementary in sequence to the lin-14 mRNA." And it was like, boom , now we know how it works. It was really cool.

Speaking of collaboration, you and your wife, Candy, work in the same lab. How did you meet?

Oh, how we met? We worked in dining service at MIT. We both were students there.

Serving food?

Yeah, serving food. In those days, you would start out in the dish room, where the conveyor belt comes in through the hole, and there's butter patties, uneaten tomatoes, banana peels and everything like that. Then we progressed to serving food. We got married in 1976.

What is it like working together?

Of course, there's pluses and minuses to bringing your job home. Naturally, you can't leave the job behind, because each person knows exactly what the other person was doing all day and what kind of stresses and challenges we were faced with during the day. So that part of it, I think, would be more difficult than if the two partners worked on separate jobs. But in the long run, the satisfaction of being able to say, Wow, we did that together , that's really priceless.

What advice would you give to an aspiring scientist?

If you want to be a scientist, go for it. Don't listen to the folks who seem to be implying that girls and women don't do science. Don't listen to the folks who say you need to go to a better school to get a head start, or something like that. If you're passionate about science at a young age, then you've already got what you need. And it's really a matter of trying to harness that, cultivate it and try to ignore your doubts.

Self-doubt is something you have to just push through, kind of suspend disbelief. All right, I'm gonna be a scientist. I'll just do it and see what happens, and hopefully it'll be OK, right? Even a farm boy from Vermont can be a scientist.