Nobel Prize Conversations

“The reason why I was doing science all these years is because I just love doing it.”

Medicine laureate Victor Ambros grew up on a farm with seven siblings. Throughout his career, he has seen collaboration as a crucial part of science.

In this podcast conversation with Adam Smith, Ambros talks about his scientific journey and how much his father has influenced him. He also shares his experiences on imposter syndrome and gives some advice on how to deal with it.

This conversation was published on 12 June, 2025. Podcast host Adam Smith is joined by Karin Svensson.

Below you find a transcript of the podcast interview. The transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors.

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Victor Ambros: I think I’ve learned that if there’s something peculiar, new, unusual and unprecedented, it is almost certainly part of some broader phenomenon.

Adam Smith: How can you be on the lookout for something that you are not expecting to find? In Victor Ambros’ case, he discovered a mechanism for silencing genes in the worm. He was studying that at the time he thought might just be a peculiarity of his worms, but turned out to be of central importance for biology. Now there are many drugs in clinical trials based on that finding. But this question of how you keep your eye out for something, but you dunno what it is central to the stories of so many Nobel Prize laureates and great scientists in general. So please join me for this conversation with Victor Ambros, where we might learn something about what it is that makes you the sort of person who can spot the unexpected.

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Karin Svensson: This is Nobel Prize Conversations and our guest is Victor Ambros, recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was awarded for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post transcriptional gene regulation. He shared the prize with Gary Ruvkun. Your host is Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer at Nobel Prize Outreach. This podcast was produced in cooperation with Fundacion Ramon Areces. Victor Ambros is the Silverman professor of natural sciences and a professor of molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. In this conversation, he speaks about growing up on a farm with seven siblings, his knack for upcycling bad and broken guitars into serviceable instruments and the mysterious and important silencer at the center of his Nobel Prize-awarded research. But first, he talks to Adam about the uncomfortable art of receiving a prize.

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Smith: You speak very interestingly about the award of prizes to individuals. You have emphasised in so much that you’ve said about the importance of teamwork in science and the sort of social nature of it and the collaborative nature of it. The focus of attention on you as a Nobel Prize laureate is very great. How do you feel about it?

Ambros: I had so many prizes that I’ve had practice of kind of trying to reconcile of the way I view myself, and then how the prizes seem to represent a viewpoint about me that I think is exaggerated. But I’ve come to understand that, ‘Victor, it doesn’t matter if you think you don’t deserve this prize? All these other smart people do. So your job is to be gracious and try to do the best you can out of the circumstances’. Really, it’s an opportunity then to actually speak to how science is done, speak to the collaborative nature of it and the importance of circumstances. I’ve had a career where I’ve always seemed to end up in really great circumstances and great labs, and working on a project that ended up identifying microRNAs. But I didn’t choose the project because I thought it was going to come up with fundamentally new biology. I chose the project frankly because Bob Horvitz said, ‘this is a good project for your postdoc’. I said, ‘yeah, it looks interesting’. It’s like that kind of random walk leads you ultimately to a place like this. You have to acknowledge that I didn’t get myself here. Then I try to emphasise, the reason why I was doing science all these years is because I just love doing it. The goal was just to keep doing it. If your goal is to keep doing it, then you probably will achieve that goal. If your goal was to win a Nobel Prize, you’re not likely to do so. These are sort of obvious things in a way, these principles, but it’s perhaps helpful for younger scientists to be encouraged to just focus on what they can do.

Smith: Yes, it was a long project. At times it was more active, at times it was less active, but you certainly kept it in focus the whole time and put resources into it when you felt there was an opportunity. I think that sense of commitment is actually quite unusual.

Ambros: I work at an institution here at UMass Chan Medical School where up and down the hallway there are folks as dedicated and incredibly bright and have fantastic projects going. I think that’s what’s so important and encouraging about the scientific enterprise, is that there’s no shortage of talent, maybe a shortage of opportunity at various levels and so forth. The thing about the Nobel Prize and the way the Swedes pulled it off, is that you really felt intensely that this was a celebration of science, but a celebration of science for all the reasons how we understand science. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, you’re the next Richard Feyman, so sign this book’. No, this is Victor Ambros signing this book. Let’s not make any illusions here. That’s what’s so cool about science, this random person can end up here.

Smith: That’s beautifully put. Has it felt like that all along? Have the various things that have happened to you since October, sort of fitted in with that?

Ambros: The spirit in Stockholm was all that. Actually, in my darkest hours, let’s say years ago, I might have thought, ‘well, what would it be like to win the Nobel Prize?’ Because people would come up to me and say something like that, and I would think, Jesus, that would be so scary, so awful. Because I would have to pretend, I’d feel like it was a lie? But instantly, when I walked onto campus that morning, everybody was so happy. Strangers were coming up to me. I realised what this is about. It’s about making people happy about science and about their institution. The University of Massachusetts got all excited. Everybody on campus was so genuinely happy for us, and happy for the institution. The state of Massachusetts is happy. So you realise, this is what it’s all about. I’m just the excuse for folks to be happy about being involved in science. The same thing in Sweden, and then we visited Washington, went to the Swedish Embassy down there. It was wonderful. In other words, it did not feel like a lie, which I was so happy about.

Smith: I remember students once boldly asking a laureate in Poland, ‘do you suffer more from imposter syndrome now that you’ve got the prize?’ The answer was yes and no but apparently in your case, the community’s happiness at your prize must be very sustaining.

Ambros: Yes. My imposter syndrome is better after this, and I don’t know why.

Smith: For all the reasons you’ve outlined.

Ambros: I think having a purpose. There was a purpose surrounding this Nobel Prize for me. The purpose is my voice could be heard when I make statements about how science is great and how scientists are wonderful, how there’s lots of talent but not enough opportunity. The kinds of things that I would kind of walk around mulling about previously. Now I could say something and people will listen. That gives you purpose. Maybe that’s the problem with imposter syndrome, is the disconnect between who you think you are and your apparent purpose.

Smith: I think when they choose laureates, I don’t think that any thought goes into what kind of ambassador they’re creating. It’s all about the science. But in your case, it’s a fantastic ambassador to create somebody who goes around and spreads that particular message, especially at such a time. This is a difficult time for science.

Ambros: Yes. This has been quite a thing because 7 October occurred before the election in the United States, right? There was still optimism. Then the election happened, and then that felt really bad and foreboding. When we were in Stockholm, people were talking about this, and I would say, ‘yes, it’s going to be real test for the States. We’ll see’. I was kind of slightly optimistic that we’d be able to manage things. But then when the new administration came into power, they just instantly started blasting away at everything.

Smith: All the thing we valued.

Ambros: Yes. The whole fabric of the US. We discovered that the way the US government works is based on human decency. That these guys, any of these presidents could have done all this before if they weren’t at least decent and took their oath to the Constitution seriously. These people are actually deliberately disruptive in the way that every authoritarian coup that we’ve ever seen across the globe. They got the manual right there on the resolute desk of the Oval Office, how to take over a country and develop an authoritarian regime? Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at all they’re doing now that we understand the motivation. Now we’re in a situation where there’s a crisis of funding, and then there’s a tax on the universities. Totally unprecedented. We’re learning how to pull together in ways that we didn’t previously. I think there’s a sense that we’re going to figure out how to do this and reset, how to reset the country, reset our universities, and reset academia and so forth. Pharma, I don’t know about them, they have to figure out how to reset too, so that we’ll come back stronger after this.

Smith: That’s very hopeful because the initial kind of response, everyone was just reeling from it. A lot of people had so much to look after that they had to look after themselves a bit. But you are hopeful that there’s a community resistance building.

Ambros: Yes, that’s right. I’m hopeful about that. There are signs that that’s the case.

Smith: I suppose your status now puts you more front and center as a spokesperson for this. Are you happy to be that person?

Ambros: I’m not happy that Victor Ambros is that person, because he’s not particularly articulate. But I’m willing to do whatever I can and with guidance from others. I’m hopeful that as a community of, let’s say Nobel Prize laureates, we can have a voice. We’re exploring how to do that. We’ve all reaching out through letters and so forth to Congress and to the public. There’s that happening. But those are gestures where there’s a letter signed by 2000 scientists that’s in the category of “you better say something”. Because if you don’t, what does that mean? We don’t have the illusion that any one gesture or one thing is going to sway anything. So there’s an acceptance of the fact that this is going to take some time by reiterative and perhaps building resistance, public resistance from different quarters repeatedly, and growing voices. It’s going to take time to do that.

Smith: It’s interesting that you point out that one could come back stronger, that there could be benefit at the end of all this.

Ambros: We have to. There’s no choice. Because what’s the other thing you say? Well, let’s give up on the USA, we’re not going to do that. Hell no. This is our country. It’s not theirs, obviously, because they don’t accept the basic premise that we are the Constitution. It’s not theirs. They can’t take it from us. That’s the attitude we have.

Smith: Just in passing, it reminds me of a line in a Laurie Anderson song. She says ‘Our America, you saw it, you tipped it over and you sold it’. That kind of encapsulates the approach it occurred to me.

Ambros: Because the thing is, the US is a terrible country in so many ways. What we’d spend our lives trying to do is to make it better. If you spend your life trying to make it better and really always having hope that it can get better and seeing signs of how it can, and that we make these steps, then that’s what our investment is. That’s how we acquire ownership of a country. That’s what I mean by it’s our country. It’s not like I say, ‘Oh, everything about the US is exactly the way I’d want it to be. That’s why I say I own it’. No, it’s because we’ve been the ones who’ve been trying for decades to make this country better and better and be what it can be? Now these guys come in and sort of tip it all over. That’s just unacceptable. Somehow we have to succeed in resisting,

Smith: I guess it’s good to be reminded what you’re about once in a while.

Ambros: Yes, trying to get better, not trying to get worse.

Smith: Pretty simple. When you speak so nicely about teamwork and collaboration, one has to mention that you grew up in quite a team. It’s pretty unusual to be one of eight children these days. It must have been quite an experience. What’s it like growing up amongst seven siblings?

Ambros: It was a farm in Vermont, so the closest neighbours were quarter mile away. We were on our own a lot, although we had a lot of chores around the farm, so I milked the cow every day. It was a big family, so there’s a lot of kids around. You didn’t get much personal attention. I really valued time hanging out with my dad, I admired him a lot and I learned a lot from him. He’s very handy, and could fix and build anything. He’s like a hero of mine. Even though I was in a large family, I would have some time with him hanging out, helping and stuff like that. Then there would be a lot of time for solitude, where you just go wandering in the woods. Believe it or not, I had a gun so I could go out and shoot things with that gun.

Smith: That does sound like boys heaven.

Ambros: Yes.

Smith: What did you shoot?

Ambros: I would shoot at things, but never really hit them.

Smith: Your parents had immigrated to the US from Poland?

Ambros: My dad did. My mom was American.

Smith: He’d had a horrible and incredibly difficult war.

Ambros: Yes. We always felt like daddy never had the opportunity that he deserved. Our opportunities, by contrast, were really great. Therefore we had to achieve. That was sort of the sense, because his education was stopped in high school when the war broke out. Then he was a slave labourer for Nazis for three years or something. He never got back to school. But he taught himself languages and he was very well read. Just briefly, I remember talking to him about Anna Karenina, the book that I’d read when I was like 65 years old. The first time I read it and I said, ‘Oh, this is an awesome book’. I went to my dad and he said, ‘yes, I read that book’. We started talking about it and we started talking about scenes in the book with beautiful description, unbelievable invoking these movies in our head. And I said, ‘When did you read that?’ He says, ‘When I was 20 or something’. He had read it in Russian. So the two of us were talking about the same book. I had just read it and he had read it 50 years before in a different language. An amazing experience. So that was the kind of person he was. He had an incredible memory and very widely read. When I was growing up, I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to show daddy that I’m really taking this opportunity that he’s given us and really going with it’.

Smith: It’s a lovely reversal of something that often happens with parents where they tell their children, we didn’t have the opportunities you’ve got, and the children squander the opportunities. But in your case, it was different. The children seemed to be telling the parents, we didn’t get your opportunities, so we’ve going to make use of it.

Ambros: To be fair, he did sit me down, like when I’d screw up. He’d sit me down and say, when I was your age…

Smith: Well, it worked in your case.

Ambros: Yes, it worked.

Smith: Running a farm is no easy thing. Did he like being a farmer? I guess that wasn’t where he thought he’d end up.

Ambros: No, he didn’t. I think my dad wanted to be an architect or an engineer. He built all the buildings on the farm himself. Then finally farming. It just didn’t pay. We had a farm, so we had all these vegetables and so on, and we had chickens, pigs and everything. All the food that we needed was basically grown on the farm. So my parents didn’t have a lot of expenses besides cars and stuff like that. We didn’t go to private school, but still it was not paying bills finally. He quit farming, but just kept a cow for me to milk every morning. Then he eventually became a cabinet maker. He had a business in town where he made cabinets, other furniture and things like that. He was a super amazing woodworker. That’s me and my brothers learned woodworking from him.

Smith: What a beautiful thing. There’s this woodworker called James Krenov, who was a American woodworker, but also of Russian descent. He wrote beautiful books about cabinet making. I’ve read them and have thought how extraordinary to be able to create such beautiful things. He used to say something about the fact that when asked why he did it, he said because I just want people to have one beautiful thing in their house. Most people can’t have many beautiful things, but if they just have one beautiful piece.

Ambros: Yes, that’s right. I’m sure that was part of what motivated my dad. He did have a flaw though. His flaw was, in his mind, there was a maximum amount anybody should pay for a piece of furniture. Like a table shouldn’t cost more than whatever, a bureau shouldn’t cost more than whatever. It didn’t matter how much time and expense he put into it, he would not build what it was worth. He was always struggling right on the edge of solvency. But he had a business that employed four or five people at its peak. They all had a wonderful time and learned a lot of stuff from him. He was an important person in his community. Actually, at one point he had like three people in the shop were members of the volunteer fire department. Whenever the alarm goes off, they have to drop what they’re doing and run to the fire. My dad was the only business only employer who paid the volunteers for the time when they were away fighting the fire.

Smith: Wow. I just love his approach to how much things should cost. It’s the absolute opposite of surge pricing. It’s wonderful.

Ambros: But we fancied ourselves, astute business people, so we would say, ‘daddy, you got to charge what the going rate is and stuff like that’.

Smith: He’d already set the precedent that you listened to him and he didn’t have to listen to you, I guess.

Ambros: Exactly.

Smith: That sounds an amazing man. And your mother was a writer?

Ambros: She was, yes. Her pen name was Melissa Mather. She was a farmer. My dad and she were partners on this farm, and she actually helped with farming sometimes during certain seasons. She’d be out there on the tractor driving around. But she wrote books. She wrote a memoir called ‘Rough Road Home’. It was about city lady moves to the country, starts a farm and the house is run down and there’s neighbours around and they’re interesting quirky neighbours. Then she wrote a couple of novels and they did sort of moderately well, she was successful enough to her income from that contributed significantly to the family.

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Smith: You were growing up in the beginnings of the space age.

Ambros: The space age was definitely a big deal. Sputnik was when I was maybe six or seven years old. I remember going out there and we’d spot it going over. Then the space race got going and it was just really enthralling. It was also risky. It was an adventure to watch it, to observe it as a youngster.

Smith: That’s interesting. You bring up risk. A lot of interesting scientists live on the edge of thinking the possible. It’s a sort of risky thinking. Sometimes it goes way out there as somebody like the chemist Barry Sharpless, who just seems to be able to think the unthinkable. But it’s funny because academic life probably doesn’t seem to most people like a risky life, except for you might lose your job. But there does seem to be an appeal in risky thinking.

Ambros: It’s really cool that most of what you do in academia, academic research is driven by yourself. You’re an entrepreneur. The ideas come from your own head and from talking to people around you and from your students and stuff like that. You put that together into this ongoing research program, it’s fueled by these periodic grant applications to the government. You try to manage that successfully. It’s completely up to you. It’s totally in your own hands. That’s kind of amazing in a way that so many people with different kinds of backgrounds and different sort of psychologies manage this, the amount of risk that you feel can vary person to person. But it definitely goes through cycles because when your grant is up for funding, that feels like you’re really out there and you’re really risking everything. Then it gets funded and then for four years you kind of like, ‘Ah, I can relax and sort of, we’ll do what we find interesting and we’ll do the best we can and so forth and see where we are in three and a half years.’ It’s an interesting cycle. But my research program has always been fairly inexpensive because I work with this nematodes C Elegans. Folks who work on mice or other vertebrates, there is huge cost to just doing their routine work. I feel like they probably feel much more vulnerable. You have to get more grants than just one and it never seems to be enough. I sense that it’s tougher in different fields depending on what your particular field is, how vulnerable you feel.

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Svensson: Adam, let’s unpack some things about Victor Ambros’ research. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering microRNA. What is microRNA?

Smith: MicroRNA is really short RNA. I guess you’ve heard about RNA?

Svensson: Yes, I’ve heard about DNA and I know that RNA is.

Smith: Keep going.

Svensson: It interacts with DNA right?

Smith: Don’t worry. It’s not a test.

Smith: DNA is the code in our cells, which tells the body what to make. Mostly they make proteins. Between the DNA and the protein is the RNA. DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein. An RNA is basically a way of transferring a code from DNA to the ribosome, which then makes the protein. So Victor Ambros found a very short sequence of RNA that was coded for by DNA, but it didn’t then encode a protein. What it did, it turned out, was to switch off another piece of RNA. It acted as a repressor of the expression of a protein. This was in his worm that he studied C Elegans. A microRNA is a tiny bit of RNA that switches off the expression of a protein. It was an entirely new function for RNA when it was discovered. Nobody expected that this mechanism would exist, but there it is.

Svensson: Later on in this conversation, he talks about the microRNA Let-7. Why was that an important discovery?

Smith: While he was doing this work on Lin-4, Gary Ruvkun in a lab just a couple of kilometers across the river in Cambridge in Massachusetts, was studying a gene called Let-7 also in the worm. The same worm C Elegans. He discovered microRNAs for Let-7. It was thought at an early stage by both Amrbos and Ruvkun that what they discovered was a worm phenomenon. This was something that went on in their little C Elegans and it was peculiar to C Elegans. But a few years later, Ruvkun in particular, discovered that this microRNA functioned across species. It’s a common mechanism to all animals. It was first discovered for Let-7. So Let-7 became very key because of the ubiquity of the Let-7 microRNA that was found everywhere. They realised that this thing that they thought was worm specific was actually happening throughout nature.

Svensson: So at the center of this story is that minute worm, this C Elegans. Why is it such an important animal?

Smith: C Elegans is a much awarded worm. It’s accrued quite a lot of Nobel Prizes. It turns out to be a really strong experimental model system to work on. There’s only about a millimeter long, and it’s reproduction cycle, I think is three days. If you are trying to change things in the worm, you can rapidly change things and get new worms with their new characteristics. Geneticists like Ambrose and Ruvkun can make alterations to genes or study genes and quickly do experiments and quickly get results. It’s small and tractable, but it has behaviour, although it’s very tiny, it still feeds. You can study feeding behaviour and see whether it likes what it’s being fed or doesn’t like. If you change a gene, you can see that it stops wanting to eat this or whatever. It’s an animal which you can study as an animal yet it’s extremely malleable.

Svensson: But I always thought the fruit flies were the favourite animals of geneticists.

Smith: Those are also very useful model system. They’ve been a traditional sort of bulwark of geneticists for many years. C Elegans came along a bit later as a model, but has also proved to be very strong. It also has the beautiful characteristic of being transparent. You can see what’s going on inside. If you label cells, they glow and you can just look at the worm and there they are. It’s really God’s gift to geneticists, cell biologists and molecular biologists, and this whole group of people who are devoted to C Elegans and love their worms very much. Let’s listen to Victor Ambros talk about why he chose to work on C Elegans.

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Ambros: What was so striking about it was it felt like it was simple and accessible. Rightly or wrongly, I got the impression that, ‘Oh, this is an organism, maybe where I could find some traction, because it’s relatively new, there’s a lot of opportunities, and it felt like there were questions that might be addressed with this animal’. Bob projected this idea, there’d be some unique perspective that would be drawn from studying this animal. Because your focus would be, let’s say, on development in terms of these minute high resolution events, like when a cell divides, and then when its daughters become one thing versus another. What kind of signals were controlling these decisions with temporal resolution. It felt to me like it would be a system where there might be some opportunities to really make an impact because it’s new and because the questions, at least as articulated by Bob, was somewhat different from the questions that were presented by more complicated animals.

Smith: If you look back over the discovery process and the realisations you had along the years, is there something you’ve sort of learned about the art of discovering something very fundamental?

Ambros: Yes, I think I’ve learned that if there’s something peculiar, new, unusual and unprecedented, it is almost certainly part of some broader phenomena, suite of phenomena. I think we have generally as a science, we’ve learned that there’s deep homology amongst organisms. But what’s, almost the case, is that that homology is also accompanied by incredible diversity and adaptation of those things. Argonauts, the protein that’s at the core of microRNAs, is an example because now folks have discovered Argonauts in all kingdoms of life. They seem to be always programmed by small nucleic acids, whether it’s RNA or DNA. They’re performing all sorts of different functions. You have these deeply conserved, fundamental molecular mechanisms and then incredible adaptations of that mechanism for incredible diversity. That’s one of the things of course we love about biology, that the organisms are all related, but they’re so all incredibly different. It’s just unbelievable diversity somehow, even amongst animals. It’s astonishing diversity among, and we’re all using sort of the same sets of genes.

Smith: Do you have a favourite example that has surprised you of how microRNA have been found to be involved?

Ambros: I think it’s still a mystery. Gary Ruvkun discovered Let-7 to be perfectly conserved across all the bilaterian animals in all the genomes. Essentially you can find a Let-7 gene that has exactly the same sequence as the Let-7 gene in C Elegans. Now, of course, in all those genomes, often there’s other Let-7 family microRNAs. But the point is our bilaterian ancestor had Let-7 with that sequence in its genome. Everybody since then has had to have it. We don’t know why or how, you asked me some surprising realisation. I feel like what’s equally exciting is these mysteries persist that Ruvkun Let-7 why and how.

Smith: That lovely question. Why are things as they are?

Ambros: Yes. If we can’t explain it on first principles, it means there’s something there to be discovered. That’s the point. The more we can understand about the conservation of Let-7, the more biology we’re going to learn.

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Smith: Your partnership with your wife Rosalind has been a very important part of your work. You’ve been working together for a long time. She was the first author on the 1993 paper. The project is one you’ve done together. It is fascinating to have such a partnership that is both sort of home and work. How do you work together? How does it operate?

Ambros: I would say the operating principle is that Rosalind her perspective on no matter what is going on, whether it’s at home or at work or in the science, is probably sort of the wisest. I can be off fantasising this or fantasising that or imagining this and that. That’s sort of what I do. Then she’s a steadying influence. Whether it’s in those projects we did with Rhonda Feba, it just the technological acumen and the persistence that Rosalind brings to the experiments, right? She can pull off experiments and get data where it requires a lot of physical labour. These were hard experiments to do. She was developing films while experiencing labour. The beginnings of labour for our second child. She’s also the steadying influence at home. She’s the person who’s keeping track of everything, keeping track of all the kids’ needs, juggling in her mind, all that stuff. At the same time managing the lab, personnel in the lab and also doing experiments. I’m sort of in awe of just the basic capabilities that she has. She has a memory that’s way better than mine. That’s another thing I draw on. The theme maybe is that the two of us are almost indispensable for each other. There’s so much we can point to in our lives that was the result of an actual partnership. As difficult as it can be, any partnership is difficult and especially a marriage can be difficult. There’s just so many things going on from so many directions. It’s not always easy to agree. It’s not always easy for me to see the wisdom of her perspective initially? It’s been almost a miraculous kind of experience, I must say. We’re still together and yesterday we hung out with our kids and four grandchildren. Despite the fact that things are really so chaotic in science in the country here, it’s great to be able to have that dimension at home to our lives. It’s always been there. No matter how messy things have been in the lab or how frustrating and so on. It’s impossible to state how fortunate I am to have Rosalind. None of this would happen without her at all.

Smith: Thank you very much for talking about it, because I think it’s almost always the case that somebody who does amazing work has somebody back at home, kind of managing life and making things work. But it’s quite unusual that that person also interacts so much with the work. You and Rosalind have this almost unique set up, but it’s extraordinary. It’s also interesting to explore your relationship with Gary Ruvkun because in a very different way you two have been working together at times and then competing almost at times. Although friendly competition always, I gather. You obviously spark off each other beautifully since your time as postdocs in Bob Horvitz’s lab.

Ambros: Yes, it was really quite an experience because I was his first postdoc, and then Gary came. Gary was a molecular biologist. He was already accomplished molecular geneticist and biologist. He taught us how to prepare DNA, how to prepare RNA from worms, run these gels and really clone things and vector. Then we did a project together in Bob’s lab and published a paper. Then we started our separate labs and we talked about kind of collaborating, but I think it just didn’t seem practical, especially since our labs were physically separated when I moved to Dartmouth up in New Hampshire. It was more like, Hey, we’ll stay in touch. We had this thing called the Boston Area Worm meeting, which occurred every month or so. People from all over New England would come together and talk about ongoing projects. There was lots of opportunity for us to stay in touch. When we published those papers together in 1993, that was the result, not of a collaboration, but just of a communication of the projects that were going in our respective labs. I try to emphasise that when I’m going around and proselytising; collaboration is wonderful, but communication is actually pretty great too. We never really felt we were competing. At least I didn’t because there was so much room in the field. There’s just so much room for investigations. I think we’re more or less informally making sure that we weren’t doing the same thing, but he would do screens that were super inventive that we never would’ve thought of. Gary’s a wonderful colleague because he’s incredibly imaginative, he’s amazing. He has a sense of humour, which sort of permeates the way he generates ideas, even scientific ideas. It’s almost never, do you have a conversation with Gary that when you don’t walk away saying, I got to think about that. That sounded crazy, but there’s something to that.

Smith: Yes. You don’t have to be right all the time. Being crazy sometimes is okay.

Ambros: Yes, it sounds crazy, but they’re usually not crazy. That’s what Gary is doing.

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Smith: I was told that you like repairing guitars. In the context of your father and his ability to build barns and cabinets, building scientific stories is a creative enterprise. Do you find that you are somebody who likes making things generally and putting things together?

Ambros: Yes. By the way, that’s one of the things that Rosalind and I really enjoy doing together, sort of restoring furniture. We get something super cheap and then you fix it up and it’s actually really nice. The guitars are a way to do woodworking, but on a small scale, you don’t have to have the biggest machines. I don’t really make furniture. I make a guitar because it’s just like nice, manageable scale. It’s like super interesting as a woodworking project because this instrument has to hold itself together against the tension of the strings. Then it’s supposed to sound good too. There’s a lot of opportunity for being really precise, but also being inventive. Then restoring guitars is kind of nice because you can get these old guitars that cost $40 when they were new, and then you can take them apart and then rebuild them with sort of better wood or bracing. Then it’s a nice serviceable guitar that costs practically nothing and it sounds really good. Now it has a new life. It was $40 originally, but then the strings sort of started to tear it apart.

Smith: I love the idea of giving this upgrade, putting some love into it.

Ambros: Yes, this thing’s going to be around now for indefinitely. It was a piece of junk and you don’t care. It sounds not bad, it plays not bad. Then I also made some from scratch too, which is really interesting too.

Smith: That sounds pretty advanced woodworking to me.

Ambros: That’s like a rite of passage. You fix a guitar, then you can get kits and assemble it. You can step into this hobby like that and then graduate to making more and more of it from scratch.

Smith: Okay. I’ll just finish by telling you something that James Kevron wrote in his book. He said he used to get all these off cuts of wood from dealers cheap, but often they were interesting woods and he kept them in his wood store and he’d just go and stand with them and caress them and wait for them to tell him what they wanted to be.

Ambros: That’s so sweet. That’s right. I have a piece of wood that my dad found under the floor of a house that he was renovating. It was an 1820 house and there was a piece of flooring under there. When he died, I inherited it. It’s a piece of cedar or something that went into that house in 1820, and it has over 170 lines of rings on it. I’ve made two guitars out of it so far. Talk about the wood calling out to you for a purpose.

Smith: Absolutely. You are giving that wood a voice even.

Ambros: Yes, that’s right in this case.

Smith: That’s very nice. I’m really grateful to you for this conversation. It’s very nice to explore all these different facets of your life.

Ambros: I’ve enjoyed it very much.

Svensson : You just heard Nobel Prize Conversations. If you’d like to learn more about Victor Ambros, you can go to nobelprize.org where you’ll find a wealth of information about the prizes and the people behind the discoveries. Nobel Prize Conversations is a podcast series with Adam Smith, a co-production of Filt and Nobel Prize outreach. The producer for this episode was me, Karin Svensson. The editorial team also includes Andrew Hart and Olivia Lundqvist. Music by Epidemic Sound. For another podcast with a six string connection why not listen to our episode with a 2022 chemistry laureate and fellow guitar lover, Morten Meldal? You can find previous seasons and conversations on Acast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Nobel Prize Conversations is produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramón Areces.