Harvard geneticist Gary Ruvkun vividly remembers the late-night phone call with his longtime friend and now 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine co-laureate Victor Ambros, when they made their groundbreaking discovery of genetic switches that exist across the tree of life.
It was the early 1990s. The pair, who had met a decade earlier and bonded over their fascination with an obscure species of roundworm, were exchanging datapoints at 11 pm -- one of the rare moments Ambros could steal away from tending to his newborn baby.
