For some time now, the scientific community has been calling for a Nobel for the ‘fathers’ of the first vaccines against covid-19. And this Monday, after more than two years of waiting, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has finally decided to grant this prestigious recognition to researchers Katalin Kariko (1955, Hungary) and Drew Weisseman (1959, United States) for the development of technology that allowed the development of a first generation of immunizations against coronavirus which three years ago generated an unprecedented health crisis. “The winners have helped to confront one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the Nobel committee enthusiastically stated during the announcement of this recognition.
BREAKING NEWS
The 2023 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/Y62uJDlNMj— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 2, 2023
The works of Karikó and Weissman have been defined as one of the “greatest advances in molecular biology of recent decades“. Their research, which for decades was undervalued and ended up being developed practically in the shadows, allowed the creation of the technology behind Moderna and Pfizer’s Covid-19 injections. Both formulas use messenger RNA to awaken an immune response against coronavirus cause of the pandemic. In the future, experts believe that in the future this type of tool could be used to create precision therapies against hitherto incurable diseases and even as a treatment for some types of cancer.
Scientific awards
This prestigious award, announced this Monday, is the first to be awarded in this edition of the Nobel Prize. Tomorrow, Tuesday, the winner or winners of the physics category will be announced and on Wednesday those of chemistry.
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In the last edition, the Nobel Prize winners left extraordinary stories. The medicine award, for example, rewarded the career of Svante Pääbo and his discoveries about human evolution and extinct hominids. In chemistry, the work of Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless for the development of bioorthogonal chemistry and its work to build molecules more efficiently. And in the physics category he was awarded Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zilinger for his pioneering research in quantum physics.
All these awards were widely applauded by the scientific community although, yes, there were many reproaches for the lack of women among the winners (since there was only one scientist among the seven distinguished in this edition).