Interview with the 2024 medicine laureate Victor Ambros, recorded on 6 December 2024 during Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

How has your childhood influenced your scientific path? 

Victor Ambros: I think my childhood experiences were definitely influential in the sense that growing up on a farm in a large family you had a lot of spare time. After we did our chores, we could go out and roam around and our parents just let us go loose in the countryside. We learned to sort of investigate things out there and hunt down small animals and things like that. It was a sense of freedom and exploration that I enjoyed right from the beginning. Also on a farm you have to help out with chores and harvest and so forth. My dad was a very inventive man, so I would work with him to repair machinery and things like that. Then he taught me how to build what I needed. 

He helped me build a trap because I wanted to have pet rabbit. I thought I would trap a wild rabbit. I made drawings of the trap and we built it together. Finally, he told me that you didn’t want to have a wild rabbit as a pet, so we bought tame rabbits. But, you know, on a farm, you learn to be a do it yourselfer. I learned that from my father. I think that helped me when I got into science, because I learned that I could build something if I needed it. 

Where does your passion for science come from? 

Victor Ambros: The passion for science for me came pretty early. It might have been books that I read. I know that I read books that were around. My mom had some books about astronomy for some reason in her library. I got very excited about astronomy, especially because we lived out in the countryside, and the sky was really dark at night and really beautiful. I was an amateur astronomer starting at about age 11. I think that was my sort of touchstone in my life. I would be imagining myself as an astronomer, like these astronomers that I had read about in the books. I wanted to be part of that tradition. 

Did you have any scientific heroes as a child? 

Victor Ambros: One hero was Clyde Tombaugh, who was a farm boy in the Midwest, who was an amateur astronomer. According to his biography, he was spotted by a professional astronomer, to whom he had sent some drawings that he made, and that got him a position in an observatory, in the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Then he eventually discovered Pluto. This was a story, an arc of a story, that I could envision, right? That if I could find myself in the right circumstances, I could be an astronomer like Clyde. 

What fascinates you about space? 

Victor Ambros:  I was born in 1953, and when the space race started between the Soviet Union and the United States, 1960-61, I was at a very impressionable age and also already interested in science. This was just a very captivating, absolutely all absorbing, captivating activity that was going on nationwide. The launches were thrilling and frightening. Each launch was something that we anticipated and watched live. We envisioned ourselves – perhaps not as an astronaut because I was really averse to risk – but the engineers and the scientists who were backing up these programmes were people that I admired. I remember being so amazed at the moon landing in 1969 because we knew that the technology they were using was all beyond state of the art for the time. I think we were inspired by the idea that you could do something that seemed impossible. With resources, dedication, and like putting enough people together to work on teams. That was, I would say, central. The space programme was sort of central to my scientific upbringing.  

What do you love about science? 

Victor Ambros: I love working with scientists. I just love being with people who are passionate about science in the natural world; who are thrilled by what we can learn about the world, what we can learn about things we can’t see, or we can never hope to see. Nobody’s ever seen a microRNA, but we talk about it, like we know all about it. It’s because we and other people have done all these experiments where the structure of the way we design experiments and pose questions, and then test them, enables us to have a measure of certainty about things that we couldn’t otherwise ever hope to see. I love being around people who also are amazed by that. I would say that if I were doing science alone, it’s almost like it would be a sad thing to do, you know? Not only the collaboration – just being around scientists and sharing with them this passion that we have. The folks who are doing science are always doing something really amazingly interesting. When you find out what interests another person, what they’re passionate about, it’s really thrilling, actually.

What’s your advice for young scientists? 

Victor Ambros: I like to say that I’m not a good case study, in terms of would I recommend that people do what I did. Because I find that my pathway in science has been a series of opportunities that were presented to me, where I was not really the agent that went and found those opportunities. So I feel really lucky, you know? I did go to a lab when I was an undergraduate and knock on the door and asked, could I work in your lab, please? But I didn’t make rational choices about who I was going to work with or what I was going to do. I guess one component of advice to young people is maybe don’t worry too much about whether you should be making long range wise decisions about specific things –  specific things to study, specific people to work with – but really definitely take advantage of every opportunity that presents it to you. 

The other thing that’s very, very important for young people to understand is that you’re going to have doubts. You’re going to have self-doubts, all of us do, even at every stage of our career. So it might be helpful for young people to know that established scientists deal with self-doubt and, do I belong? Am I good enough to do this? Is what I’m doing worthwhile? All these things. As a young person, if you have doubts like that, don’t think that, oh, this is a problem with me, right? That’s just human nature. Encourage yourself and also seek people who can encourage you. But one of the most important things I think, is don’t give up. Because you think that maybe you’re not suited for this, or you’re not good enough. If you’re feeling a passion for it – passion for science is essential – and it’s most of what you need, because that’s going to drive you to learn as much as you need to learn about something, and to really take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to you.  

Do you have any advice for scientists dealing with failure? 

Victor Ambros: Science involves investigation. It involves investigation of a phenomenon, phenomenon that we don’t understand. We do the best we can to imagine what sorts of investigation we need to apply. What kinds of questions are the important ones to ask? We draw up hypotheses that we can test with experiments, and we do the best that we can, but often the hypothesis is wrong, and you find it’s not true, and you’ve been able to disprove it. So now you rethink everything. Science involves a lot of learning. New skills, new methods, things that are new to you, new bodies of knowledge that you didn’t know about before. So you’re always being sort of tested in new contexts. I think it’s important to learn to welcome that, but also expect that there’s going to be pitfalls in that. I often find out that there was a whole area of that knowledge that I had missed. And had I known that, I wouldn’t have wasted my time on that particular experiment or something like that. So experiments don’t work, machines break, and so forth. Sometimes this can be very frustrating. It can sometimes take a long time until you feel you’re back on track. But that’s a natural part of the process. I think everybody who does science will report the same things, that there’s lots of failures. Of course you learn from them, and those are the best kinds of failures.  

I think one of my co-laureates, John Jumper, said something the other day that was interesting: you try to adopt a strategy of some sort where you fail often. Because if you fail only once every six months or every year, you’re not making much progress. But if you fail daily, you’re learning daily.  I think that’s what he meant. 

Have you ever experienced imposter syndrome? 

Victor Ambros: The anecdotes that I can offer that are hopefully really revealing, is I have colleagues whom I really admire a lot. These are colleagues who I feel have it all together. I say, whoa, wouldn’t it be awesome to be her? What a publication record, what an amazing series of discoveries she’s made. Then there’ll be an instance of some kind where we’re being frank with each other about something, and this person reveals that she’s been fighting imposter syndrome her whole life. And I’m thinking, I don’t understand this. I feel like, nope, you of all people, you’ve got it all together, right? Then another colleague, a man, he will say the same thing to me after we’ve gotten to know each other for 25 years. So you realise that even all these people that I feel I know are incredibly talented and incredibly successful, feel the same thing.  

Then we’ve come to understand this as a natural part of human nature. It’s just something that happens to everybody. Sometimes you have to live with it daily. You go to work and you wonder if you belong, but you do the best you can, and you kind of see, as you get older, you just learn to smile at yourself about it. And just say, well, there you go. You think you’re an imposter, but what can you do about it? You just got to keep working, doing the best you can and pretending that you got it all together.  

I’ve heard that we witness ourselves day to day, minute to minute, because here we are in our own head. We’re very concerned about what other people think about us. We interact with people in a way that involves trying to kind of reject a certain self and you’re hoping that’s your best self, but it’s not your best self because my self is in here, and I know it. You’re working always with this dichotomy between what you think people think of you and what you sort of know you are. It’s just a wonderful crazy part of being human. Until you understand it, it’s normal. It can be debilitating, especially for people who already feel out of place, if you’re a minority, a woman, people who already feel they look different from everybody around them. I’m lucky I’m a white guy – the world just sort of opens up like this for the white guys, frankly. So I can’t complain about suffering from imposter syndrome, because the circumstances for my career have been extraordinarily straightforward for me, almost welcoming for me, in a way that nobody deserves.  

How did you meet your co-laureate Gary Ruvkun? 

Victor Ambros: I first met Gary Ruvkun in Robert Horvitz‘ lab, where we were both postdoctoral fellows. I was Bob Horvitz’ first postdoctoral fellow, and Gary was Bob’s second postdoctoral fellow. We came together to the lab and were both inspired by Bob to study the same sort of set of genes that Bob had identified as having very interesting impact on development in the nematode, C. elegans. So there we were in this worm lab with Bob as our supervisor, and Gary came from his PhD studies where he did a lot of genetics and molecular biology. He taught me and other members of the lab sort of fundamentals of molecular biology as it pertained to recombinant DNA and DNA sequencing and that kind of technology. We had a good time taking molecular biology lessons from Gary. It was very expansive and funny to listen to. 

How would you describe Gary Ruvkun? 

Victor Ambros: Gary Ruvkun is a very creative person, very creative thinker, and a free thinker, I would say. He has lots and lots of ideas and notions. He’ll make associations and connections between and amongst phenomena and observations that are sometimes astonishing. We’ll joke with him that he’s often wrong, but if you’re creative and you invent a lot of ideas, you end up with a lot of really good ideas. That’s what Gary is like. He also inspires his trainees to be incredibly successful. I admire him a lot because many people from his lab have set up their own labs and done really, really well. Part of that is the kind of intellectually openness that Gary brings to the community that he’s in.  

How important is collaboration in science? 

Victor Ambros: Collaboration is absolutely vital in science. It’s very, very rare that any scientist does anything alone, especially these days. There’s two, well, probably many reasons for that, but amongst the reasons for why collaboration is so vital is that when we think together and we have conversations amongst two or more people about something that those people are really passionate about and really interested in, and really curious about, there’s a marvelous synthesis. When you have two people talking about something that they’re really interested in, it’s more than just twice one person. Because the exchange of ideas can be catalytic. You can see it happening and experience it happening that neither one of us would’ve thought of that, ever, and you realise now that’s happened. Having experienced that over and over, then you know that collaboration is absolutely vital for this thing to work at all. 

The other part of that is that nowadays the investigations that we conduct are very interdisciplinary. They can involve somebody who’s a human geneticist, somebody who’s a structural biologist, somebody else who’s a molecular biologist, or people who are computational biologists. You could even have an artificial intelligence expert on your team for some sort of component of the investigation. The synthesis is more than just the minds getting together and sort of creating new perspectives and new ideas and things like that, we also literally are bringing a parallel and complimentary expertise into play so that the experimentation has multiple dimensions. That now can be done quickly. You could imagine that you could say, all right, I’m going to do this project, and I’m going to hire a data analyst and I’m going to get an artificial intelligence expert and somehow bring in a clinical geneticist into my lab, and build this team. The collaboration is so exciting because it allows us to do things that we never would’ve imagined doing, just by walking down the hall or writing an email or two.  

Why is diversity so important in science? 

Victor Ambros: As somebody who grew up in science during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and have the privilege of still doing science today, I’ve seen major cultural changes in science. For one thing, I’ve been in environments where the idea was: science is done by elite intellects. It’s very special people. If you want to belong to our institution, show me that you’re amongst the elite. There was a kind of the opposite of welcoming, kind of like an extreme meritocracy. It left young people feeling like, do I measure up? I probably won’t. Gradually, things have changed a lot. Institutions have worked on trying to diversify their workforce, and that includes people working in science. 

As working scientists, we’ve come to sort of organically experience how the diversification of the research team that I’m associated with, has evolved over the years as the culture has changed. The way we work becomes so much more alive, because folks are willing to offer what they think, what their perspective is on a problem you’re working on. There was a time when my lab had people from eight different countries in the same lab. Sometimes I just sit back and think like, what’s going on here? These people came from everywhere. They have so many different backgrounds. And the way this conversation is going has to be because of the fact that they have so many different backgrounds. Can you imagine if it was a whole room full of me, the white guy from the farm in Vermont? How many perspectives wouldwe bring to the table? It’s making us better at science, and it’s going to only get better as we grow in this area. 

Can you tell us about the guitars you build? 

Victor Ambros: One of the things I learned from my dad was woodworking. My dad was a farmer, and then after that, he was a cabinet maker and he had a business in town making furniture. He was a very gifted cabinet maker. Me and my brothers learned from him how to do woodworking. I also love guitars, so about maybe 10 years ago or so, I started building guitars as a hobby. I find it really fascinating, because it’s an amazing instrument, and it involves a lot of engineering compromises as you’re trying to build it. It involves wood and sort of the nuances and the sonic qualities of wood and so forth. It has a certain serendipity to it. You build a guitar and you don’t really know what it’s going to sound like until you string it up and try it. It is a really dramatic kind of event when you finally try it out. So it’s a combination of woodworking and music.

Watch the interview