Dawkins is not the only scientist who thinks so. Stanford professor of biophysics Michael Levitt agrees, with a recent tweet describing Kariko as his “superhero of science … the scientific force behind the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. She fought naysayers, grant rejection & demotion to save our world”.
Born in 1955 in the small town of Kisujszallas, Hungary, Kariko reportedly grew up in a one-room house with no running water or refrigerator. Her father was a butcher and she started her first biological experiments on animal carcasses. She began her lifelong interest in messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) in 1978, an interest she would take with her when she migrated to the US.
What is mRNA? If we think of DNA as being the base code of our cells, the RNA translates this code into a format our cells can read. Messenger RNA is simply a single-stranded molecule that gives our cells instructions on which proteins to build.
MRNA elicits what scientists call an innate immune response, while traditional vaccines trigger an adaptive, or acquired, immune response. An innate immune response works at the physical, chemical and cellular level to limit the spread of a pathogen throughout the body, whereas an adaptive response uses lymphocytes to attack a pathogen that has already spread. The use of mRNA is so promising that it may pave the way for “a general-purpose vaccine”, science author Matt Ridley writes in a recent essay.
The Pfizer and Moderna coronavirus vaccines being rolled out around the world – one of which is on track to be used in Australia from March – use this new mRNA technology. This marks a paradigmatic shift: until last year, vaccines have primarily used live viruses (rubella, mumps, measles) or attenuated — that is, dead — viruses (influenza, hepatitis A).
One of the reasons the new mRNA technology is so exciting is because the traditional method of creating a vaccine is time-consuming. When creating a flu vaccine, for example, scientists have to grow the virus in fertilised hens’ eggs before they can isolate it, subject it to chemical breakdown procedures, then purify and test it. This process usually takes about four months from when a new influenza virus is identified.
In contrast, an mRNA vaccine can be created in a matter of hours from when a new virus has been genetically sequenced.
And this is exactly what happened back in January last year, when scientists from the US received the genetic sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 from a lab in China.
Give this woman a Nobel Prize.https://t.co/KQrjyvI2ez
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) December 26, 2020
UPenn "told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality,†she said. â€When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.’â€
The Moderna vaccine was created on January 13, just 48 hours after receiving the genetic sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 and, similarly, the Pfizer vaccine was created on January 25, just one day after receiving it. The 11 months between the creation of these vaccines and their deployment have been taken up by three phases of clinical trials testing their safety — but the vaccines themselves were developed almost immediately.
It is perhaps a tragic irony that it has taken a pandemic for Kariko’s work to be finally recognised. What began as a theoretical vision has taken a long time to materialise into something concrete.
In the 1990s, Kariko accepted a demotion at the University of Pennsylvania so she could continue to work on the potential of mRNA therapeutics, which at the time did not look promising.
“Every night I was working: grant, grant, grant … And it came back always no, no, no,” she recalls in an interview with health and medical publication Stat News.
Vaccines are one of the most remarkable achievements of medicine, and science more generally. We often forget that our ancestors of only 100 or 200 years ago regularly had to bury loved ones who had died from diseases such as typhoid fever and smallpox. Visit any cemetery that holds graves from a bygone era and you will read headstones of people who died as children or young adults. Modern anti-vaccination movements in the West have arisen in large part because vaccination programs have been so successful that few people can remember when childhood infectious diseases were an ever-present threat.
What is so exciting to those who are watching the scientific enterprise unfold today is that the use of mRNA in vaccines may be a leap into the future as monumental as the discovery of the first vaccine itself. So if there is a silver lining to the horrible year that was 2020, this remarkable scientific breakthrough would be it, along with the fact Kariko, the visionary and dedicated woman behind it, finally will be able to see her work bear fruit.
Claire Lehmann is editor-in-chief of the Quillette platform for free thought.
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“Give this woman a Nobel Prize,” Richard Dawkins tweeted on December 27 in reference to Hungarian-American scientist Katalin Kariko, whose obsessive work across a 40-year period laid the groundwork for the world’s first coronavirus vaccines.