Four 2024 Nobel winners have MIT ties

Two MIT professors, an alumnus, and a former postdoc are among the winners of 2024’s Nobel Prizes.

ADAM GLANZMAN (ACEMOGLU); MICHELLE FIORENZA (JOHNSON); COURTESY OF UMASS CHAN MEDICAL SCHOOL (AMBROS); COURTESY OF THE HARVARD GAZETTE (RUVKUN)

Professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, PhD ’89, shared the prize in economics with political scientist James Robinson of the University of Chicago, with whom they have long collaborated. Using evidence from the last 500 years, their work has empirically demonstrated that “inclusive” governments such as democracies, which extend individual rights and political liberties while upholding the rule of law, have generated greater economic activity than “extractive” political systems, where power is wielded by a small elite. Partly because economic growth depends on technological innovation, it is best sustained when countries protect property rights, giving more people the incentive to invent things. 

Acemoglu, an Institute Professor, has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1993. Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, was chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2007 to 2008.

Meanwhile, Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and Gary Ruvkun, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, shared the prize in medicine for their discovery of microRNA, a class of tiny RNA molecules that help govern gene regulation. This crucial mechanism allows cells with the same chromosomes to develop into cell types with different characteristics and functions.

The foundation for their discoveries was laid by their work on mutant forms of the roundworm C. elegans as MIT postdocs in the lab of Professor H. Robert Horvitz (who would win a Nobel in 2002). Later, working independently, they showed that a certain roundworm gene produces a very short RNA molecule that binds to messenger RNA encoding a different gene and blocks it from being translated into protein. Since then, more than 1,000 microRNA genes have been found in humans.

In an interview with the Journal of Cell Biology, Ambros also credited the contributions of collaborators including his wife, Rosalind “Candy” Lee ’76, and postdoc Rhonda Feinbaum.