Harvard's Nobel Laureates in Medicine

Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, is a recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that regulate the activities of thousands of genes in plants and animals, including humans. He shared the award with Victor Ambros, Silverman Professor of Natural Science at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Ambros was a professor at Harvard starting in 1984 until moving to Dartmouth in 1992.

William Kaelin, the Sidney Farber Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is one of three winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. He shares the award with Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe of the University of Oxford and the Francis Crick Institute, and Gregg L. Semenza of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The three were cited jointly for the discovery of the pathway by which cells from humans and most animals sense and adapt to changes in oxygen availability, a process essential for survival.

What began as a simple question regarding yeast cells, has broadened the scientific community’s understanding of aging and death on the cellular level, and quite possibly, our bodies as a whole. Described as a “scientist’s scientist,” Szostak has been studying the ends of chromosomes and a special enzyme, called telomerase, which helps hold the ends of chromosomes together and protect them from deterioration. In his research, he discovered that some cells whose telomeres do not activate normally have a way of evading destruction – enter cancer cells – and this finding has brought forth a flood of larger questions surrounding cancer research and the aging process. British born, Jack Szostak is a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. Since his award-winning reaching on telomeres, Szostak has shifted his intellectual curiosity from the death of cells, to the genesis of life itself as co-director of the Origins of Life Initiate at Harvard University.

Buck received the Nobel Prize for work relating to the sense of smell, which the Nobel committee noted had “long remained the most enigmatic of our senses. The basic principles for recognizing and remembering about 10,000 different odours were not understood.” Buck and Richard Axel, with whom she shared the prize, published the fundamental paper describing odorant receptors in 1991. That year Buck became an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “The discoveries on the organization of the olfactory system that were cited by the Nobel Foundation were made over a period of 10 years, during which I was a faculty member at Harvard,” she said. Since 2002, Buck has been at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

The ambidextrous Murray, who performed the first successful human kidney transplant, is one of the few surgeon-scientists to win the Nobel. Although committed to his lab work, Murray’s first concern has always been the patient. During World War II, doing reparative surgery, particularly with burns patients, Murray became intrigued by the dynamics of tissue rejection and acceptance, leading him to his interest in transplant surgery.

When told he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize, Wiesel said, “Oh, no, I was afraid of that! I better go and hide.” For Wiesel, what really counts is the research and its results, like improvements in the treatment of congenital cataracts and other blinding conditions found in children. Wiesel is President Emeritus of The Rockefeller University.

In a partnership spanning decades, Hubel and Torsten Wiesel have provided the basis for our understanding of how the brain analyzes visual information. The pair describe their work as a 50-50 effort. Says Hubel, “It’s been a real Gilbert and Sullivan sort of thing. Not that we would compare ourselves to those celestial people, but they did do different things and you wouldn’t say one did more than the other.” Hubel is John Franklin Enders University Professor of Neurobiology and Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows.

Benacerraf’s discovery has several dramatic applications, helping us to understand: 1) the body’s ability to repel microbial invasions, 2) the mechanism by which the body accepts or rejects skin grafts or organ transplants, and 3) the growth of tumors, invaders that outwit or fool the body’s defense system. Benacerraf is the George Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology Emeritus.

Wald contributed greatly to our knowledge of the human eye, particularly the visual pigments and how light affects them. He was on the forefront of the revolution that changed biology from a cellular to a molecular science. An early and outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Wald was always a lively, engaged, and formidable figure in the political arena.

Bloch’s painstaking research helped cap the half-century dubbed the “Golden Age of Biochemistry.” Determined to communicate with the intelligent layperson outside of the scientific community, the emeritus professor in (1994) published a book of lively pieces titled Blondes in Venetian Paintings, The Nine-Banded Armadillo, and other Essays in Biochemistry, which demonstrates (among other things) that many Renaissance portraits featured “bottle blondes.”

In 1953, at the tender age of 25, the enfant terrible Watson, with British scientist Francis Crick, presented a model for DNA, beating Linus Pauling in a neck-and-neck race to one of the most significant scientific discoveries of the 20th century. His controversial book, The Double Helix, “has been called,” says The New York Times, “the most honest book ever written about scientific research.” Watson is currently president of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y.

This engineer, who in his youth was intrigued by the high-pitched Gypsy music of his native Hungary, has been lauded for “fathoming the enigmas and disclosing the elegance of the auditory system.” His delicate engineering feats included the design of special scissors, whose blades were a few thousandths of an inch long, to manipulate the cochlea, a minute structure in the inner ear.