The lifesaving, Nobel Prize-winning discovery that almost didn’t happen
Katalin Karikó co-won a Nobel Prize this week for her groundbreaking work on mRNA vaccines — but she had to fight against professional science to do it.
The Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded on Monday to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, for discoveries that led to the development of mRNA vaccinations, including those developed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Arguably few Nobelists had a hand in saving more lives than Karikó and Weissman. One study estimates that in the US alone, the vaccines prevented over 3 million deaths and 18 million hospitalizations and saved more than $1 trillion. Worldwide, of course, the effect was even larger.
By far the most effective vaccines against Covid-19 were the mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, and both companies benefited from the discoveries of Weissman and Karikó about how to change the body’s immune response to mRNA. Their Nobel Prize, obviously, is richly deserved.
In hindsight, little medical research was of more importance than Karikó’s work at Weissman’s lab on making mRNA vaccines a reality. But at every stage, the research community that should have embraced this research instead stymied it, because of powerful incentives in science toward work that is more fundable and more publishable.
