Victor Ambrose: Why Rosalind Lee, the wife of the Nobel Prize in Medicine researcher, also did not win it. Science

This Monday, the Nobel Prize Organization signed a message on the X social network: “Congratulations to our 2024 winner Victor Ambrose. This morning he celebrated with his colleague and wife Rosalind Lee, who was also first author of the 1993 study room Cited by the Nobel Committee. The message was accompanied by a photo of Ambrose and Lee smiling at the camera.

The message was viewed more than a million times and received dozens of comments. Among them are many who wonder why Li did not win the Nobel Prize with her husband. Few people remembered another Rosalind—Franklin—and her 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Since 1901, 227 people have won this award. There are only 13 women. Is the Nobel jury being unfair? Everything points to ‘no’.

Contrary to what you might think, being the first author of a study does not mean being the most important. Typically, the last signatory is the leader of the research group. In the study cited by the Nobel Committee, Lee is listed as the first author and Rhonda Feinbaum as the second author. The study reported that both put in equal amounts of work in the study.

Pilar Martin, a researcher at the National Center for Cardiovascular Research and an expert on microRNAs, points out that the fact that Ambrose signed last and was the corresponding researcher makes it clear that he led the work. “In science, the corresponding author (the one who submits the study to the journal and to whom any questions about it should be directed) is the one who designed the experiment, the intellectual author of the research. Nobel Prizes are given for new ideas for humanity, and in this case it is very clear that Ambrose and Ruvkun are responsible,” he believes.

This is not the first time that the Nobel Prize in Science has come with controversies. These awards can only be presented to a maximum of three people, several of whom excluded Spaniard Francis Mojica from the podium in 2020. Two seminal 1993 studies detailing the discovery of microRNAs, one led by Ambrose, the other by Ruvkun, had a total of six authors participating in the experiments, already exceeding the maximum number of winners. will be. In addition, the Committee also took into account other subsequent studies in which other authors also participated.

To Martin, the controversy generated by Lee’s case is merely “noise”. “Biomedical science is not something one can do alone, it requires a lot of work from many researchers who contribute to the experiments, but are not the ones who designed the research. He added, “That’s how science works, you learn to test what your boss thinks by doing experiments.”

Rosalind Lee’s case is even more special, as she has been Ambrose’s wife since he signed that first paper in 1993, when she was a lab assistant. Lee has signed with Ambrose to several studios during his career. It may seem as if she was under the influence of her husband, although this was not the case. In the specialized microRNA community, Ambrose and Ruvkun are largely considered the fathers of microRNA discovery. There are also researchers who have been working in this field for years and do not know Rosalind Lee.

The researcher himself has celebrated this award as a collective victory. “We felt we had accomplished something,” she explained in an interview at the University of Massachusetts, where she is currently a senior researcher in a group led by her husband. “We have contributed to scientific knowledge and that’s what all researchers want to do; Our work can serve as a pillar for others to discover new things. It is amazing what has now been achieved in the field of microRNAs.”

In 2008, Ambrose and Ruvkun, along with David Baulcombe, won the prestigious Lasker Prize for Basic Medical Research. In his speech, Ambrose made a very relevant argument about how research is conducted and who gets the rewards. He said, “The thing I love most about science is that it is an extremely human endeavor.” “The success of this work, and that of the individual scientist, comes from the fact that we do it together. We worked in small teams like (Rosalind) Candy Lee and Rhonda Feinbaum when they discovered the first microRNA; Or when we share our beloved and secret scientific results, as Gary Ruvkun and I did for our discovery of antisense base pairs between microRNAs and their targets; “Or like when we published our results to tell the rest of the world and I was surprised to see another study done in 1999 by David Baulcombe’s group, which showed the existence of microRNAs in plants,” he highlighted. Poured.

That paragraph alone contains direct and indirect indications of enough scientists to fill the Nobel Science podium for possibly many years.

Bruce Wightman, a researcher at Muhlenberg College (United States), was the first author of another seminal 1993 study on microRNAs led by Gary Ruvkun. In an email, the researcher once again explains the complex network of collaborations behind each Nobel Prize. “Science is a collaborative effort and any project is developed over years with many contributors. The discovery was made possible thanks to the work of Marty Chalfie, Bob Horwitz, and John Sulston, who won the Nobel Prize for their findings published since 1981. Scientists highlight that this was a study Science In 1984, Ambrose was the first author and Horwitz the last, making possible a collaboration with Ruvkun that was worthy of another Nobel Prize. Indeed, Ambrose believed that he would never be awarded the Nobel Prize, because his disciple Craig Mello had already won it for his discovery of RNA interference.

The story becomes even more complex. Wightman says his contribution to the discovery of microRNAs “was central.” This was the work of his doctoral thesis, but it in turn depended on postdoctoral students: Prema Arasu, Thomas Berglin and Ilho Ha, he highlights.

In 1958, American biologist Joshua Lederberg won the Nobel Prize in Medicine along with two other researchers for their study of the genetics of bacteria. The jury did not recognize the work of his wife, Esther Lederberg, although she worked in the same field and was the intellectual author of part of the investigation. “I understand that people are surprised when the boss’s wife contributes to the investigation,” Wightman says, “but I don’t think that’s the case with Lee.”

Swedish Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, wrote in his original will of 1895 that the prize should go to “the person who had made the greatest contribution to physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine in the previous year.” The three-win rule was not clarified until much later, in 1968. Since then, each of the three Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry has been shared by three people. As Joseph Goldstein, president of the Lasker jury in 2016, explained, the need to limit the number of winners forces us to stick only to “those who inaugurate a new field and maintain it.” In which science is done.

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