“I just took off going north,” says Gary Ruvkun about his trip to Eugene after he graduated from University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s. “It’s hard to believe my parents thought this was a good idea.”
On Monday, Oct. 7, Ruvkun and his colleague Victor Ambros learned they will receive this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking work in gene studies. The two discovered microRNA, which is an incredibly small gene “fivefold smaller than any other gene that anybody had ever seen in any other critter,” Ruvkun says in a phone interview. Knowledge of the gene will help explain how antiviral processes work and how diseases happen.
But long before Ruvkun was a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School or breaking scientific barriers out of his lab at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, he was roaming around the outskirts of Eugene in a $1,500 used Dodge van that his parents gifted him for graduation.
Today, Ruvkun is a Nobel Prize winner. In 1973, he was a Hoedad.
The Hoedad Reforestation Cooperative was founded in the early ’70s by former Lane County Commissioner Jerry Rust and friends. It was a movement made up of a group of hippie-dippie-type Eugeneans who planted trees in an effort to restore Oregon’s lush forests. Until the end of its run in 1994, the Hoedads employed hundreds of people (including women, which was wild for the time), fundraised to save the WOW Hall from being sold in 1974 and challenged the “lazy hippie” stereotype — all while bothering the heck out of reforestation inspectors.
When Ruvkun graduated from Berkeley, he applied to around 10 medical schools, and was rejected from all of them because he didn’t meet basic transcript requirements. “I thought, ‘I’m good enough.’ [The colleges] were like, ‘No you’re not,’” Ruvkun says.
So, with nothing planned for his first year out of college, he packed up his van and ended up in what we now call the Dirty Eug. One night, his friend that he was staying with took him to a Hoedad meeting, where he joined the Natural Wonders crew. Hoedad crew names ranged from Mudsharks to Red Star — “which, you can imagine, were kind of Maoist,” Ruvkun says. And the rest is history.
Ruvkun spent Oregon’s six months of winter going from place to place, planting trees, building relationships and doing the hardest work he had ever done, and having the time of his life. “It was fucking cold and rainy, kind of miserable,” Ruvkun says. “But I was living large because I had the van. I was like the prince.” Most people slept in tents.
While he looks back on this period as one full of rigorous labor that taught him the invaluable lesson of teamwork, Ruvkun says, “It also gave me a hundred stories to tell.” Of everything he’s taken away from the experience, it seems to be these that he holds most precious to him. He has many stories of the people who he’ll never forget, who were all wonderful to him, even though he was from California. “The natural tendency would be for people in Oregon to hate me, but they didn’t,” he says fondly.
When asked to share one of these many stories that helped him later make friends in medical school, he responded simply, “a lot of them involve illegal behaviors.”
Flash forward 50 years, and he is now a Nobel winner working out of Harvard and Mass General, but he remains modest. “Sometimes people do science, and nobody cares. Sometimes people do science and somebody cares,” he says. “And you get a measure of it by how often your papers are cited by other papers.”
He says he is proud of his work and all that he’s accomplished, but he wouldn’t be the person he is today without the Hoedads. He says that his Hoedad experience was “an extremely magical thing for me,” and he still feels connected to Eugene. So much so that he flew across the country last year for the Hoedads’ 50-year reunion. He asked Eugene Weekly to specifically make sure that on his behalf we say “‘Hey’ to everybody. I love you.”
So Eugene — and all former Hoedads — Nobel Prize winner Gary Ruvkun says, “Hey.” He loves you.