what do you want to ask professor ruvkun?your hypothesis while conducting your research? oh, no hypothesis on that. no, no, no, no. it was a complete surprise. and i love surprises. and, really, you know, that's the beauty of doing genetics, is that what comes out is what teaches you. right? you know, you do a mutagenesis. you get an animal that looks like what you're looking for. part of the search is saying, "what am i going to look for?" that's the art of it. how did your research, along with victor ambros, go down when you first published it in the early 19905? it was in a little corner of biology, this worm. and there was a sense when you would deliver a paper, go to give a talk about it, that, well, it's a worm, who cares? you know? and it's a weird little animal. until we discovered that it was in human genome and then many other genomes, and it's been embraced. and what was especially sort of empowering to it was it intersected with rna interference, which is an anti—viral response. and people really care now, of cour

this year's medicine laureates, gary ruvkun and victor ambros has shown how a new form of gene regulation, is crucial in ensuring that the different cells of organisms such as muscles or nerve cells get the functions they need. it is already known that abnormal levels of microrna increase the risk of cancer, but the laureates' research could lead to new diagnostics and treatments, for example it could map how microrna varies in different diseases, helping unlock prognoses for the development of diseases. so, gary, your research was based on looking at mutant strains of the round worm, actually it should have its own nobel prize, it's pitched so much in research that's led to nobel prizes butjust tell us, what is your work with roundworm tell us about genetic mutations in humans? doing genetics is a form of doing whatever evolution has been doing for 4 billion years. our planet is a genetic experiment. it has been generating diverse life from primitive life over [i billion years by inducing variation to give you the tree of life that goes to bats, to plans and to bacteria and we do that on