On October 7, 2024 the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Victor Ambrose and Gary Ruvkun “for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation” (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2024/press-release/). The prize-winning research was published in back-to-back 1993 papers in Cell demonstrating in the nematode worm C. elegans that the lin-4 microRNA regulates the translation and degradation of lin-14 mRNA post-transcriptionally in the cytoplasm during transition from the first to the second stage of larval developments by base-pairing to the target mRNA. When Ruvkun and colleagues later identified and characterized the more evolutionarily conserved let-7 microRNA to play a similar post-transcriptional regulatory role during the transition from late larval to adult stages in animals from mollusks to vertebrates (but not in plants, yeast, bacteria, jellyfish or sponges), the scientific community began to accept microRNAs as part of the canonical developmental regulatory machinery of multicellular organisms [1].