Three American Scientists Honored With Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Committee honors several Americans for their contribution to medicine Monday for their research aimed at bettering our world.

Three American scientists have been awarded Nobel prizes in medicine and chemistry that could lead to better health treatments.

Massachusetts professors Gary Ruvkun and Victor Ambros discovered Micro-RNA. Ambros and Ruvkun have identified a new kind of genetic material that transformed how researchers understood gene regulation. Like DNA, RNA is a form of genetic material made from individual nucleotides linked into chains. According to the central dogma, genetic information flows in one direction: DNA is transcribed into RNA, and RNA is translated into proteins. But in one major deviation from the central dogma, some RNAs are never translated or coded into proteins.

MicroRNA is one type of these so-called noncoding RNAs. They’re short stretches of genetic material that, rather than coding for a specific protein themselves, control the RNAs that do code for proteins. In effect, microRNAs turn particular genes on and off.

University of Washington Professor David Baker also won for his work using AI to predict and even design proteins. Baker, 62, whose work has received funding from the National Institutes of Health since the 1990s, created a computer program called Rosetta that helped analyze information about existing proteins in comprehensive databases to build new proteins that don’t exist in nature. The ability to custom design new proteins — and better understand existing proteins — could enable researchers to create new kinds of medicines and vaccines.