Reacción a "Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology awarded to Ambros and Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNAs and their role in gene regulation"

It was a great joy to learn about this year's recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ambros and Ruvkun revolutionized our understanding of the cellular programs that determine the identity of our cells, discovering that gene expression is determined not only in the nucleus but also in the cell cytoplasm, when RNA instructions are converted into protein. The crucial aspect of his discoveries is that the molecule that controls this step is another RNA, of very small size, which belongs to a type of molecule almost unknown until now: non-coding RNAs. These findings opened up a very important field in molecular biology, since these small RNAs are being used decades later as therapeutic tools to control genes or as disease markers in clinical practice. 

And I especially emphasize that the discovery of these small RNAs took place in tiny worms (1mm) with a complex name (Caenorhabditis elegans) and used in basic research, although a few years later it became clear that this new cellular mechanism is evolutionarily conserved and is of key importance in humans as well. Therefore, to recognize the work of these researchers is to highlight the essentials of basic research (including non-human model organisms), which is often undervalued by science policy decisions.