"In the late 1980s, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were postdoctoral fellows in the laboratory of Robert Horvitz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002."
So a single MIT lab produced 3 Nobel laureates; I'd say that's impressive. (Noting that the 2 current laureates had moved on to Harvard and Mass Gen when they did the relevant work.)
He was born through an extramarital affair of his father, Swedish biochemist Sune Bergström (1916–2004), who, like his son, became a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (in 1982). Pääbo is his mother's only child; he has via his father's marriage a half-brother (also born in 1955).
Anyone who's had a great mentor knows how impactful they can be on the trajectory of your career just in terms of how much more effective you can be.
This isn't impressive. It's a sign of concentration of power, of nepotism, and of exclusionary policies. It's the usual dirty politics we see all over the place.
How you don't see that as an abuse of power is beyond me. Sometimes HN feels eerily like talking to Trump supporters that rationalize any abuse.
In this case, the discovery of microRNAs ushered in a whole new area of biology and medicine, and led to techniques (easy methods to selectively target and suppress gene expression) that facilitated discoveries in many other areas.
They have many choices at their disposal. And they intentionally choose from only a small narrow pool of potential winners to keep it in the family. That's corruption.
Of course, if your point was "it doesn't matter how deserving the winners are, they're all corrupt" then that's the sort of argument that facts can't counter.