A personal reflection on meeting Victor Ambros – Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of microRNAs – and why the experience strengthened my belief in the value of curiosity-driven science.
Some moments during a PhD stay with you forever. My lunch with Victor Ambros will surely be one of them. I want to document it here because it was one of those rare experiences that quietly shape your thinking about science, mentorship, and why we do the work we do.
Before the lunch, I took time to prepare. I read several of his papers, revisited articles about the discovery of microRNAs, and listened to multiple podcasts that featured him. The most impactful one was the Night Science episode.
What struck me during that conversation was not only Victor Ambros’ perspective, but also the hosts' framing of basic research – research driven not by immediate application, but by deep curiosity (chapter “The Power of Basic Science”). They pointed out how difficult it is to communicate to the general public why such work matters. Biology is often tied to medicine, and people naturally look for the translational angle: How does this discovery help humans? What disease does it cure? How will it improve lives?
But this expectation exists only because biology happens to touch human health.
Fields like astrophysics or mathematical logic rarely face this pressure. Their lack of direct impact on daily life is accepted – even celebrated – because understanding the cosmos or the structure of mathematics is seen as intrinsically worthwhile.
In biology, we often bend ourselves into knots to justify basic questions with applied answers. For grant proposals, for presentations, for the general audience, there is always the implicit request to “explain the benefit.”
Yet many breakthroughs – including microRNAs – did not emerge from a roadmap designed to improve human health. They came from people following threads of curiosity because the underlying phenomena were fascinating.
"I think maybe we have to give young people permission to express or to articulate, you know, [their desire to investigate what fascinates them, even without a clear purpose]. And it's not just a sense of wonder, but it's illustrating what we don't know about things and how incredibly amazing they are. And I guess in a way that also kind of illuminates the mysteries more." - Victor Ambros in the Night Science episode
This mindset resonated deeply with me. My own fascination with (pi-)RNAs and repetitive elements is rooted in the same curiosity – the desire to understand these mysterious genomic regions simply because they are mysterious. Listening to that interview made me even more excited about meeting him in person, because I felt aligned with the way he sees science.
We were a small group of six fellows (1 advanced research fellow, 3 postdocs and 2 PhD students including me) at lunch. One of the very first things he did was truly surprising in its simplicity: he took a blank sheet of paper, drew a rectangle representing our table, and wrote down each of our names around it. It immediately showed how intentionally he approached the conversation and how much he cared about getting to know us.
Moments like this remind me how fortunate I am to be at the NIH. The institute and PIs go above and beyond in creating chances for fellows to meet the people who fundamentally shaped modern biology. I am genuinely grateful for these opportunities - and for how accessible and human these scientific “giants” often turn out to be.
During the lunch, each of us introduced our research and backgrounds. He listened intently, asked thoughtful follow-up questions, and encouraged us to elaborate on ideas that mattered to us. When I talked about piRNAs, computational genomics, and my interest in AI, he responded cautiously. His view on AI was conservative; he didn’t make sweeping predictions. Yet he mentioned something that I found both charming and insightful: he would love a personalized recommendation system for scientific papers, essentially a research-focused “For You Page.”
After the lunch, he delivered his WALS lecture, “Genetic mechanisms controlling developmental timing in C. elegans.”
A recording is available here (possibly not available outside of the US):
The room was completely full – a clear sign of how enduring and influential his work remains.
Just two days later, on Friday, we had another exceptional lecture – this time by Adam Phillippy, Senior Investigator and Head of the Genome Informatics Section at NHGRI. He is known for leading the efforts that produced the first complete, telomere-to-telomere (T2T) human genome assembly and was named one of Time Magazine’s most influential people in 2022.
His presentation was outstanding, especially from a bioinformatics perspective. He explained how the Human Genome Project left roughly 10 percent unresolved – mostly because densely packed heterochromatin regions were long considered nearly impossible to assemble. With the advent of new technologies (PacBio HiFi, Nanopore ultra-long reads) and innovative assembly strategies, this became achievable, although the final 10 percent – the true “dark matter” of the genome – still required an additional 20 years to fully resolve. These regions lie predominantly in centromeres and telomeres and are among the most repetitive, structurally complex segments of the genome. Repetitive elements are deeply relevant to my current research in piRNA biology, since piRNAs play a central role in silencing transposable elements embedded within these repetitive landscapes, thereby protecting germline genome integrity.
He also shared recent efforts to generate complete Great Ape genomes and differences between human and non-human primate genomes and chromosomes. I won't go into more detail here, most of his presentation was unpublished work and I cannot wait reading his papers.
While his talk was not recorded for public release, below another excellent keynote presentation:
Walking out of these two talks, I felt a renewed sense of gratitude. Within the span of 49 hours, I had learned directly from two scientists who reshaped their fields – one through curiosity-driven basic research, and the other (surely through curiosity as well) through transformative computational genomics work.
Both reminded me that science is, at its core, an act of curiosity.
Together, they created a week I will remember for the rest of my PhD and beyond.