Rosalind Lee
Biomedical scientist
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Rosalind 'Candy' Lee is a biomedical scientist, best known for her breakthrough paper on the discovery of microRNA which was published in 1993.[1] In 2002, Lee was joint recipient of the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, for the best paper published in the journal Science that year.[2] In 2024, Lee's 1993 paper was cited as the seminal discovery for which the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded that year, to co-author Victor Ambros, her husband.[3]
Rosalind Lee | |
|---|---|
Rosalind Lee 2024 | |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Known for | Discovery of microRNA |
| Awards | Newcomb Cleveland Prize (2003) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Harvard University Dartmouth College UMass Chan Medical School |
Career
Lee graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976.[4] That same year, she married Victor Ambros, who was at that time a PhD student at MIT.[5]
Lee began working as a research assistant in Victor Ambros' lab in 1987. Her work on the cloning of lin-4 began in January, 1989, in Ambros's lab at Harvard University, and she was joined on the project in the fall of 1989 by Rhonda Feinbaum, a postdoc.[6][7] Lee and Feinbaum worked for a couple of years in a labor-intensive search for a gene behind a mutation.[8] What they eventually discovered was microRNA,[9] adding a new mechanism for gene regulation.[10][11] The 1993 paper was soon accepted for publication, and in a change of journal policy, it was published with a notice on the front page that it was jointly first-authored by Lee and Feinbaum,[6] clarifying that both contributed equally to the research.[12] In a 2004 paper, Lee, Feinbaum and Ambros describe how they eventually wrote up the work in 1993, and submitted it to the journal Cell, in parallel with a related paper by Gary Ruvkun.[6]
Lee's co-authored 1993 paper is widely regarded as the seminal contribution in the discovery of microRNA, for which her husband Ambros and Ruvkun were both awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024.[3] The Nobel announcement provoked interest into the question of why Lee hadn't also been recognized with the award.[12]
As of 2024, Lee is a Senior Scientist, in Program in Molecular Medicine, Dr. Victor Ambros's Molecular Medicine Laboratory, at UMass Chan Medical School.[13]
Awards
- 2002 Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Co-recipient for her first-author paper in Science that reported the discovery of 15 new microRNA genes in C. elegans.[14]