What’s the biggest science story of the year? My vote goes to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for the discovery of function for a type of “junk DNA” that produces microRNA (miRNA), a crucial molecule involved in gene regulation. That so-called genetic junk would turn out to be functional was a prediction of intelligent design going back to the 1990s. On that, ID has been vindicated over and over again, now by the Nobel Committee. Our colleagues Richard Sternberg and Bill Dembski were early predictors, as critics of what Jonathan Wells called in a 2011 book, The Myth of Junk DNA. 

While David Coppedge broke the Nobel story for us back in October, it came up as I was traveling and I completely missed it. Last week I did a podcast on this year’s Nobel Prize (it’s below), and I realized what a huge story it is. Better late than never, let’s dig into what was discovered.

First, the official Nobel Prize press release explains:

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation

This year’s Nobel Prize honors two scientists for their discovery of a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated.

The information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body. Every cell contains the same chromosomes, so every cell contains exactly the same set of genes and exactly the same set of instructions. Yet, different cell types, 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 cell type.

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were interested in how different cell types develop. They discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation. Their groundbreaking discovery revealed a completely new principle of gene regulation that turned out to be essential for multicellular organisms, including humans. It is now known that the human genome codes for over one thousand microRNAs. Their surprising discovery revealed an entirely new dimension to gene regulation. MicroRNAs are proving to be fundamentally important for how organisms develop and function.

Essentially, they discovered that microRNAs are small RNA molecules that can bind to messenger RNA (mRNA) that encodes proteins, which prevents the mRNA from being translated into proteins at the ribosome. These microRNAs “play a crucial role in gene regulation” that is extremely common in multicellular organisms.

An Almost Deafening Silence

The discovery was first made in the tiny roundworm C. elegans, where miRNA turns off a gene called Lin-14. Again, the press release explains:

Ambros and Ruvkun performed further experiments showing that the lin-4 microRNA turns off lin-14 by binding to the complementary sequences in its mRNA, blocking the production of lin-14 protein. A new principle of gene regulation, mediated by a previously unknown type of RNA, microRNA, had been discovered! The results were published in 1993 in two articles in the journal Cell.

But the press release then notes that the response from the scientific community was not what you would expect for a discovery that would eventually win the Nobel Prize: 

The published results were initially met with almost deafening silence from the scientific community. Although the results were interesting, the unusual mechanism of gene regulation was considered a peculiarity of C. elegans, likely irrelevant to humans and other more complex animals.

There is another reason why these papers at first got so little attention — and that’s because microRNAs are produced by non-protein-coding DNA, the type of DNA long dismissed as “junk.” 

MicroRNAs Were Once Considered Derived from “Junk DNA”

Now the official Nobel Prize press release does not say that microRNAs are produced by a type of DNA once considered “junk.” But leading scientists make this exact point. An article in Current Science about this year’s Prize states: 

Although, by the early 1990s some non-coding ‘genes’ including the hsrω in Drosophila, Xist, H19, etc. in mammals were known to be essential for organisms’ normal lives, they remained exceptions without making any dent in the widespread text-book level strong belief in ‘selfish’ or ‘junk’ DNA. In this backdrop, Ambros and Ruvkun groups’ discovery that the lin-4 gene of C. elegans produces a small non-coding RNA (ncRNA) that inhibits activity of the lin-14 gene through RNA interference decisively catalysed a widespread interest in ncRNAs that hitherto had remained rather ‘ostracized’. RNA interference also explained the mystery of the earlier known phenomena like post-transcriptional gene silencing and ‘quelling’.

The Science Media Centre of Spain reports that a biochemist at the Autonomous University of Madrid remarked:

This finding is of great importance, transforming our understanding of the regulation of gene expression and attributing critical functions to a fraction of the human genome that was previously considered ‘junk DNA’ because it does not code for proteins.

Nicholas Robine, Director of Computational Biology, Cancer and Functional Genomics at the New York Genome Center, posted a tweet declaring, “Nobel for the not-junk-DNA! microRNA”. After the journal Scienceposted about this research, Robert Sarnovsky, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, commented, “There are a lot of important things in what was called the ‘junk DNA’ not too long ago.” Indeed, a short bio for Victor Ambros, co-winner of this Nobel Prize, explicitly notes that the microRNAs he helped discover are the product of what was “once thought to be ‘junk DNA’”:

In 2024, he and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking discovery of miRNA. MiRNAs regulate protein production in cells and were once thought to be “junk DNA.” They are found in plants, animals, and some viruses, playing a crucial role in gene regulation.

And a commentary about this Nobel Prize by Subhash Lakhotia, a distinguished professor of cytogenetics and zoology in India, titled “Celebrating tiny RNA  that unraveled humongous complexity of biological regulation,” extensively discusses “Selfish and Junk DNA.” He asks “[w]hy the 1993 discovery of novel post-transcriptional regulation of lin-14 gene by small non-coding RNA in Cenorhabditis by Ambros and Ruvkun labs did not make an immediate global impact?” He points to skepticism arising from the belief in widespread junk DNA. Here are the two answers he gives to his own question:

• “The text-book level strong belief that anything not coding for protein is ‘selfish’ or ‘junk’ DNA”
• “The lin-4 and lin-14 genes were seen only in species related to C. elegans, but not other organisms”

Lakhotia goes on to decry this “reductionist” belief in junk DNA and says that he “[n]ever believed that some part of the genome is useless or ‘selfish’ or ‘junk’.”

Many Others Recognize MicroRNAs Was Once Dismissed as “Junk”

If this weren’t enough, prior to the awarding of this Nobel Prize, it had been widely recognized that the DNA that encodes microRNAs was previously called junk. To give a few examples, a 2015 article at The Conversation — “Explainer: microRNA, the puppet master of the genome,” by two molecular biologists from Australia — states: 

Up until about two decades ago, one type of RNA, called microRNA, or just miRNA — by virtue of them being very short, only 18-25 letters long — were thought to be the junk mail of the genome, with no biological function. But today we know that these miRNA are actually not junk but play a very important role in regulating the activity of other parts of your DNA.

A press release from USC says, “Formerly thought to be ‘junk DNA,’ miRNAs are now known to affect gene expression by preventing messenger RNA from making proteins.” Another article at The Conversationpublished in 2020 was titled “MicroRNAs: the ‘junk’ genetic material with huge potential to fight cancer and dementia.” Even a 2013 paper in the journal Veterinary Pathology reviewed the roles of microRNAs in animal development and disease, and remarked, “The discovery and validation of miRNA function also refute the faulty ‘junk DNA hypothesis,’ which stated that more than 80% of our DNA serves no biological purpose and is ‘junk’ that has accumulated over time as evolutionary fossils.” 

Evolution Stopping Science — Again? 

MicroRNAs are another case where the presumption of a genome bloated with useless debris — something that evolutionary thinking, unlike ID, would expect — has proved to be an impediment to science. As I have discussed in the past, the evolution-inspired junk DNA paradigm has been no friend to scientific advancement. But this year’s Nobel Prize raises the question with a special poignancy: Did junk DNA thinking slow a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery from being recognized? The answer appears to be yes.

First, recall that the Nobel Prize press release noted the “almost deafening silence from the scientific community” to this discovery way back in 1993. It was dismissed as an anomaly, peculiar to C. elegans. The scientific community was just not ready to accept that non-protein-coding DNA could be that important — and junk DNA thinking had everything to do with that mindset.

This point is in fact explicitly spelled out in the article in Current Science, worth requoting. It states that initial discoveries of function for non-protein-coding DNA in the early 1990s were thought to be “exceptions without making any dent in the widespread text-book level strong belief in ‘selfish’ or ‘junk’ DNA” and it was against “this backdrop” that Ambros and Ruvkin made their discovery. Thus, the article notes, as we saw, that the DNA that produces these small non-coding RNAs had previously been “ostracized”!

And finally, consider Subhash Lakhotia’s question: “Why the 1993 discovery of novel post-transcriptional regulation of lin-14 gene by small non-coding RNA in Cenorhabditis by Ambros and Ruvkun labs did not make an immediate global impact?” He says the answer in part is because of “The text-book level strong belief that anything not coding for protein is ‘selfish’ or ‘junk’ DNA.”

So there you have it. Not only was this 2024 Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery that a type of junk DNA is actually extremely important (it produces microRNAs that regulate gene expression), but we see that the evolutionary “junk DNA” paradigm probably hindered acceptance of this groundbreaking discovery. 

As we have long discussed, intelligent design was already predicting function for junk DNA around the same time this discovery was made way back in the early to  mid 1990s. If ID had been a major theory in biology back then, perhaps the scientific community would have accepted this important mechanism far earlier, advancing biomedical knowledge much faster. Let’s hope that next time around, it won’t take 30+ years for such a well-deserved Nobel Prize to be awarded.