This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine is scheduled to be announced in October, so remember her name. It's hard to imagine that anyone can beat what she and her partner accomplished; it wasn't the vaccine itself they developed, but without her groundbreaking work on mRNA, we'd still be waiting.
Two things that stood out for me:
1. It took the scientists at BioNTech a matter of HOURS to plug the genetic information for the coronavirus into their model (which was based on her work) and come up with the vaccine's design. They had a couple of hurdles to overcome as far as actually delivering it was concerned, but all the hard work was already done. What this means is that if variants prove resistant to the existing vaccines, new vaccines can be developed rapidly to deal with them. It will be similar to the flu vaccines that have to be reworked every year because there are different strains of flu every year.
2. Her bosses at the University, who had no faith in her at all, demoted her and laughed when she finally said she was leaving to work at BioNTech. "BioNTech? They don't even have a website!". Who's laughing now? |
