Yup, That's Them

Ohio State's Carlo Croce takes center stage in this Smithsonian Magazine article that also tells the story of how microRNAs were uncovered. In the early 1990s, Croce had been looking for a gene for chronic lymphocytic leukemia, but didn't come up with anything. Then, though, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were studying different C. elegans mutants in which they found those mutations were in genes that coded for microRNAs. Croce and one member of his lab, George Calin, then took another look for the CLL gene: "Croce looked at Calin and blinked. 'S---!,' Calin recalls him saying. 'These are the genes!'" the article says.