The committee’s decision is a recognition of the central role that discovery played not only in safeguarding lives during the pandemic but also for opening the possibility of creating vaccines and therapies for other diseases such as cancer. These vaccines work by smuggling the genetic instructions for making viral proteins into our cells, enabling them to churn out large amounts of the protein and ‘teach’ the immune cells to fight the virus. A big hurdle in developing such life-saving vaccines was that the prototypes of these mRNAs led to inflammatory reactions, making them unsuitable for medical use.
Kariko and Weissman’s work remained overlooked for years, often treated with scepticism and disdain, resulting in a scarcity of funding that is so important for long-term research. The Nobel is a reminder that spectacular breakthroughs don’t come easy. They rest on decades of meticulous, often unrecognised, research. Their work also underscores the need to support scientists and their research, even when it seems that there is no commercial or practical application. Because we simply don’t know what is lurking around the corner.
