One day in early August in 2001, Victor Ambros received an email from an editor at Science, asking him to review two new studies the journal was considering publishing. Ten years earlier, Ambros and his wife and lab manager, Rosalind Lee, had discovered a strange new sort of molecule — a tiny bit of free-floating genetic code that came to be known as microRNA — inside the millimeter-long bodies of C. elegans roundworms.
For most of the ensuing decade, they and others believed that this microRNA was an evolutionary one-off, a quirk peculiar to the lowly C. elegans. Then, in early 2000, a friend and collaborator named Gary Ruvkun found another one, this time in all sorts of animals, including sea urchins, frogs, fruit flies, and humans. Rather than an oddity of worm biology, these molecules, it appeared, were both ancient and everywhere.
Inspired, Ambros and Lee launched their own search, and by spring the following year had unearthed a dozen more microRNAs. The discovery had them riding high through the summer, as they took trips to their country house and cheered from the sidelines at their teenage sons’ baseball and soccer games. Then came the email from the editor.
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