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

Where does your passion for science come from? 

Gary Ruvkun: My passion for science really probably begins with my father being an engineer. When we would go on a family vacation to the mountains, most families would take a walk in the woods, on a trail, and we would stop at a dam for hydroelectric power. My father would point out, “that’s where the generators are, that’s where the water is held, and that’s a potential energy” and that sort of thing. That was probably when I was five years old.  

But my passion sort of really got launched big time by this US space programme which is not unique to me by any means. Essentially, my whole generation was inspired by that. That was early television, because I’m born in 1952. The space race begins really in around 1961. Watching launches when I’m nine years old, means waking up at four in the morning to watch the launch. The space programme was about showing the Soviet Union that we’re better, right? It was all propaganda, well, much of it was propaganda, because there was no good reason to go to the moon. There was no real reason to go, and it ended up being 4% of the US Gross National Product being spent on this. So it was a huge expense and it was symbolic, and to say, “look, we have missiles and we have nuclear weapons, be advised, don’t mess with us.” That’s how it got approved, but what it ended up doing was inspiring a bunch of 10-year-olds, and 8-year-olds and 14-year-olds. The American scientific revolution – now we think of America as this technological marvel, Silicon Valley has this mythic status, now molecular biology and biotech – it was launched by the US space programme. That was not the intent, but it was worth the 4% of the Gross National Product.

What fascinates you about space? 

Gary Ruvkun: It teaches us that Earth is a dot and that the solar system is a dot. Going to Jupiter was a big deal, right? We sent a spacecraft to Jupiter when I was 20, maybe. I had nothing to do with it, but I could watch and be in awe of it. By the way, John Casani, the chief engineer of that mission to Jupiter and Saturn, he rode in the backseat of my car from Woods Hole to Boston, Massachusetts 30 years later. And you’d have to pinch me. I had the chief engineer of a project that I thought was the most awesome project in the history of science. And he’s in my backseat! I was smiling a lot, two hours of driving. 

Why do you love travelling and what can you learn from it? 

Gary Ruvkun: I embarked on a full year trip, third class buses all the way across Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, down to Panama, onto the Amazon River, down the Amazon River in a riverboat. $12 to go 800 miles, you know, this is not first class travel. The way you sleep on this riverboat is by hanging your hammock outside from a bar. If it’s calm, you have a lovely moment on a hammock. But the Amazon is like an ocean, and when it’s windy, the hammocks are banging into each other. This is a working class transport. Then a thousand miles on the TransAm Amazon Highway, but that’s not a highway. It’s a dirt road at that point. I don’t know what it’s like now. But then to carnival, which is the great partying tradition, almost like the Stockholm all night party, except it goes on for a whole city. That was in Salvador de Bahia, which is a famous place to go for carnival. So, lots of travel.  

What happens when you travel is you meet other travellers for sure, who are quite expert at how to navigate your way. You have guidebooks, but they don’t really tell you the real dope on how to do it. So you end up talking to other people, and of course you meet people on the road. You kind of learn how to read people quickly and befriend people or not. That happened a lot. That helped me for the rest of my life with sort of instant assessment and instant bonding with people. And that happens in my lab, where I have to assess people, and I entertain them. I have good stories to tell and it’s good to not be boring. I do have a kind of a hundred stories that I’ll tell over and over and over again.  

What were you like at school? 

Gary Ruvkun: In high school, I was not the most outstanding student from age, whatever it was, 15 to 18 or 14 to 18. A great concern to my parents was that you would be graded on your behaviour. “Unsatisfactory” was like you’re really misbehaving and disrupting everything. I did not get that. But a “W” means warning and that means you’re at the edge of unsatisfactory. I was noisy and would sort of blurt things out. I call that interesting, but they call that disruptive. My father is not disruptive, and he would lecture me about these citizenship grades.  

It’s a kind of normal thing to not be entirely sure where you’re headed. It’s a different era. When I went to college, it was 1969 to 1973. It has some similarities to today, because there’s a lot of political activities. In the US, it was about the Vietnam War, which was a very unpopular war, and it haunted males of my generation. I could have been drafted into the army. There was a lottery, and my number, I think was 121 if I remember correctly, and they got down to maybe 60 that year. It’s a random lottery who gets in. It was never really high odds that I was going to be drafted, but I know people in science who did get drafted and did go to Vietnam.  

I was at Berkeley, which is a very active university. It had what was called the free speech movement in the early sixties. It was well known for being politically left wing. I didn’t participate as much as many of my friends did because I was such a nerdy science guy. I wanted to make sure I was learning what Berkeley had to offer in its courses. I think too many people get completely distracted by sort of social conventions. All of our instincts are not perfect, and so you have to watch out for those instincts. To me, universities are a cultural evolution that has happened in the last thousand years. They’re remarkable and helpful. 

My parents should have been worried about my career, but I think they had other things that were grabbing their attention more. So they figured I would work it out. I think they were happy that I had reasonable grades in the university. They were happy that I went through Berkeley and didn’t mess up. I think they understood that, when I go and plant trees with a cooperative in Oregon and go to Latin America for a year, that’s kind of what 21-year-olds and 22-year-olds do. But there was not a clear career path by any means. I think they were fine with that because the whole generation was behaving that way. They kind of decided, “he’s just part of that generation. They’ll either find out how to do it right or they won’t.” 

What should aspiring scientists do while they are at university? 

Gary Ruvkun: My education in science was coloured by focusing on physics for a couple of years. At Berkeley, the physics professors were sort of mythic status. Berkeley was where J. Robert Oppenheimer worked before the Manhattan Project. He was very big in nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. Physics is taught, interestingly, in a historical fashion. Biology is not, which I think is a mistake. Because physics is taught historically, you sort of see how people did things in 1800s and all of a sudden in 1920, there’s a revolution, which is quantum mechanics that comes mostly out of Germany. Very mathematical, and I barely understood it, but I did understand it. And what I really understood was what a scientific revolution is. And that was a scientific revolution. When I got to graduate school, again, I didn’t have a vision of what I wanted to do. I sort of knew that biology was exploding. I had a kind of an instinct. It really wasn’t knowledge, it was kind of an instinct. When I got there, it was clear it was exploding. I started to really learn again the history of the double helix, which was sort of a 1953 discovery by Nobel laureates Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins. Then the genetic code and how that was solved. These were earth shattering discoveries and just knowing, experiencing, what was important.  

Then having role models, as in my graduate programme, who were scientists, who just were icons and people that I could watch how they think and how they really think about science. I had five years of watching it. The way I think about graduate school, it’s not a lot of coursework, at least the way we did it, but you see something like a seminar a week often from somebody who’s really profoundly great. Not all of them are great, but half of them are great. So if you’re five years of doing that, you see something like a hundred awesome examples of science, very diverse. Somebody’s working on yeast, somebody else on bacteria, somebody else on a monkey, all these different things. You just have examples. I explicitly in my PhD imitated a few of the examples I saw and said, I think I can apply that to what I’m studying. 

How did you meet your co-laureate, Victor Ambros? 

Gary Ruvkun: Victor Ambros and I met day one of my postdocs. So I go to Bob Horvitz‘s lab. Bob is probably 32 years old at that point, maybe a little bit less. He just starts his lab. His lab has been going for maybe two or three years. Just a little anecdote, he was friends with Fred Ausubel, who I did my PhD with. And before I contacted Bob about going to work with him as a postdoc, Fred Ausubel, my boss had said, “Bob Horvitz is moving and he needs somebody to help him move. Can you help?” Bob saw that I did heavy lifting, and that’s sort of a subliminal thing that say, “oh, he’s a hard worker.” I show up at the lab and Bob says, “well, here’s a project we’re thinking about. Victor Ambros has just started working on it.” 

Victor and I start talking and we get along really well. We worked together for three years where we overlap as postdocs in Bob’s lab. When Victor gets a job a mile away, two kilometers away, from where I get a job, we continue to collaborate because we’re close by. He’s very understated. He doesn’t sort of beat his chest on how brilliant he is, but there’s constant discovery. Every time you talk to him, you can see a raw intelligence and broad reading. When you see somebody who’s creative and well educated, it’s great, and it’s been like that for 40 years. 

How important is collaboration in science? 

Gary Ruvkun: What collaboration in science means is that people work on related topics. It doesn’t mean you’re working together so much. Somebody communicates a result from a a rice plant and it uses some of the similar components to the things we are working on in a worm. It makes us realise how it works in the worm, and it makes them realise how it works in a rice. The thing to think about is, humans have something like 25,000 protein coating genes and probably a thousand microRNAs. MicroRNAs are sort of 5% or whatever of the genes in a human, and then a worm has the same number of these genes. But it’s not that the worm has a different collection. Most of the worm genes are related to the human genes. Most of the human genes are exactly the same in primates. About half of them are the same in plants. So that the currency of genetics, like what’s in play to make an organism happen, is a very small number of genes. Think about it as 20,000 genes on the planet and there’s 500,000 molecular biologists. There’s more of us than there are genes. Any gene we work on, when we get a mutation, you can instantly say, oh, somebody worked on that in bacteria, or somebody worked on a related gene in a plant or a fungus. That’s informative. Now it’s slightly competitive because you can get scooped by those people and vice versa. But it’s much more informative than competitive. 

Do you have any advice for scientists dealing with failure? 

Gary Ruvkun: A single postdoc in my lab now will discover 30 genes in a year or two. It used to take a lab of 20 to do that for 10 years. So things got accelerated. That means the risk for doing anything is suddenly decreased. If it fails, if you do something and you say, oh, I can’t make sense of that, two weeks later you do something else. It’s good to work in a system that allows risks, and we do that. We gamble a lot when we do our genetics. The other thing about genetics, that people fail to appreciate, is that when we’re doing genetics, we’re looking for variation in genes that we induce with mutagenesis usually. But that variation is the same thing that happens in evolution. The way all the diverse birds you see have been generated, is by variation in genes that selects for this colour and that behaviour. 

What made the world a special place, the reason we have an oxygen atmosphere, is that photosynthesis evolved and it evolved by genetic change. And it’s not a geneticist doing it, it’s just random variation. It’s survival of the fittest. We as geneticists are just doing survival of who we care about. We select for this and that, and we say, “I wanna look at that and I’ll do a genome sequence of that.” But the reason it works so well is the reason that the earth has a billion different species. Genetics really works. 

We know you love to cook. Are there any similarities between science and cooking?  

Gary Ruvkun: Working at the bench is very much adding things to tubes and following recipes. Before I did that, I did cooking. I probably learned to cook in the boy scouts. The boy scouts was a way to go up and go hiking, and I enjoyed that. But that taught me how to cook. I had to cook. You get merit badges, you wear a little sash, and you have little badges. I got a merit badge in cooking, which really means how to put hamburger in foil and stick it in a fire. It’s not great cooking. But for example, I have a recipe for Mexican chicken that I’m quite proud of. That recipe evolved when I ate at a Mexican restaurant in Houston and really enjoyed their Sopa Gallo. I sat there in the restaurant, slurping like the people slurp wine to try to figure out what was in it. I even entered my Mexican chicken recipe in a contest at Mrs Renfro’s Habanero sauce, which I lost. So I’m an award losing cook. It was a tragedy because I should have won. It was a miscarriage of justice, I still think. Now my goal has been to get firemen and women – who are famous for cooking in the firehouse, because eating is what they do between fires – I’ve been trying to get them to make my Mexican chicken, or let me make it for them. My daughter is a medical student, and she went out with the emergency medical services. I say, “can you pitch my Mexican chicken to them? I’ll make it for them.” I think they didn’t find it credible. 

How did you celebrate after the Nobel Prize announcement? 

Gary Ruvkun: My longtime administrator Diane Sacchetti has worked with my lab for almost 30 years and helps put the grants together to submit to get money, and does all the administrative work of ordering for the lab. But also is like a friend to everybody who’s ever worked in my lab. People love Diane. She’s a close family friend along with her husband and children. Frank runs ice cream trucks all over Boston. It’s called Frosty Ice Cream. It’s the kind of truck that will pull into a park on a hot summer day and it’ll play, I don’t know if they do it in Sweden, but they play the kind of plink, blink music and everybody knows the truck has arrived. My daughter and I have worked on the truck a few times just for fun. It’s super fun to do, because when you make the little frosty cone and hand it to the person at the window, they can be 80 years old, but they look like they’re eight years old because they’re happy to get an ice cream cone. So Diane said, “can I have Frank come the day of the Nobel Prize?” So after the press conference that we had, where I work at Massachusetts General Hospital, in the parking lot, there was Frank’s truck with Frank Jr. I climbed on and started serving it to people. It was hundreds of people who are scientists who work in our lab, but it was in our parking of our institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. That video had a bazillion hits, right? Everyone likes a frosty cone! 

Watch the interview

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