
For those who have reached the mountains because they didn’t stop on the hills!
People are extraordinary birds,
with wings that grow inside,
beating while floating, gliding,
in a cleaner air – which is thought!
—Nichita Stănescu
Perhaps such wings are grown by those who manage to soar into the heights of science, into the adventure of their own calling, and towards the sublimity of the unknown, to give it meaning and taste its understanding.
From there, they gracefully descend to bring order to us, the inquirers who remain on the ground, lacking the craft of turnesol wings.
Yesterday, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to researchers Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for “the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.”
“The information stored in our chromosomes can be compared to an instruction manual for all the cells in our body. Each cell contains the same chromosomes, meaning each cell has exactly the same set of genes and instructions. However, different types of cells, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very distinct characteristics. How do these differences arise? The answer lies in gene regulation, which allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions. This ensures that only the correct set of genes is active in each type of cell. Their discovery is revolutionary because it has revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that has proven essential for multicellular organisms, including humans,” states the Nobel Committee.
Genetic research conducted over the past 20 years has emphasized that cells and tissues do not develop normally without this microRNA. These regulatory molecules, as the name suggests, contain only 22-25 nucleotides, compared to messenger RNA molecules, which can have thousands of nucleotides.
Abnormal regulation by microRNA can lead to cancer, and mutations in genes that code for microRNAs have been found in humans, causing conditions such as congenital hearing loss, eye disorders, and skeletal disorders.
We are practically talking about a completely new branch of genetics, with huge implications for possible future treatments for diseases currently considered incurable.
Yesterday also marked 16 years since the death of George Emil Palade, a great Romanian-born American biologist, physician, and scientist, with notable contributions to the field of cell biology, and the only Romanian to have won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1974 (together with Belgian scientists Albert Claude and Christian de Duve) for discoveries related to the functional organization of the cell, which played a crucial role in the development of modern cell biology.
A peer from his generation once said:
“Galileo Galilei invented the telescope. And one night, he pointed it towards the sky, looked, and saw what no one had seen before. Palade did the opposite. He took an electron microscope made in the 1930s by some Germans, looked at cells, and saw what no one had seen before. Galilei mapped the heavens, and Palade mapped the cell.”
I believe that, from Palade onwards, we truly began to understand what happens in the micro-dimension of the organism.
Günter Blobel, a student of the scientist at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, and a Nobel laureate himself, stated:
“Palade was to cell biology what Einstein was to physics.”
I first heard of him around 1985-86, listening with awe to the discussions between my father (Professor Constantin Sănduță, an early pioneer of interdisciplinarity and a systemic approach to sports phenomena in Romania) and Professor Mircea Ifrim at our dining table. I didn’t understand much back then, but the name stuck in my memory until 1993 when another distinguished Romanian physician, Professor Gheorghe Benga, spoke to us during our cell and molecular biology courses about Palade’s genius.
The most important element of his research was the explanation of the cellular mechanism of protein production. He highlighted intracisternal particles rich in RNA, where protein biosynthesis takes place, called ribosomes or Palade particles.
Through biochemical analysis of isolated mitochondrial fractions, together with Philip Siekevitz, the Romanian doctor definitively established the role of these subcellular organelles as the major components in energy production.
Professor Benga missed a few lectures, as he was traveling to America, where he shared with us the existence of a water channel protein in the red blood cell membrane (later named aquaporin-1), which he had managed to detect in 1986, with the help of a substance provided by Dr. Ross P. Holmes from the University of Illinois.
His primary research focused on the micro-universe of the cell, particularly the subcellular membranes of the liver, molecular interactions, and the mechanisms of water transport through biomembranes, with medical applications in epilepsy and muscular dystrophies (in collaboration with his wife, Professor Ileana Benga, who had extensive research activity in epilepsy and neurometabolic diseases in children).
He was saddened because in 1992, biochemist Peter Agre published a study on aquaporin’s property of transporting water through the cell membrane, in which Professor Benga was omitted from the bibliography.
Although he received multiple international awards and recognitions, he never got the Nobel Prize. In 2003, with the same topic, the American won recognition in Chemistry in Stockholm, while the Romanian was excluded.
I don’t know Agre personally, but what I do know for sure is that Romania doesn’t yet have another teacher and researcher as talented as Professor Benga (I still keep the yellowed pages, hard to read now for an untrained eye, on which I learned to take coded notes so I wouldn’t miss any ideas from his hypercomplex academic presentations to students).
I bow with gratitude to these exceptional people.
They weave bridges with their work, “over which souls traverse from one to another, in search of the original unity,” in the words of Nichita!
Comments