The 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.
The Prize Motivation: “For their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19”.
The concept of messenger-RNA has been around since the 1960s. Many researchers worked on the concept. There is no Nobel for mRNA alone.
What Kariko and Weissman did was find a way to ‘make mRNA work’.
Their mRNA discovery remains, for some, controversial but for others it has thrown the Medical Research door wide open. The utilization of mRNA to fight auto-immune diseases like Lupus – to attack cancer tumours – and to develop therapeutics to fight viral diseases is unimaginable.
Medical Science Discovery Builds on Medical Science Discovery
Discoveries are often not recognized as significant at the time they are presented but collectively, they pay off. For example, the 1910 research by Francis Peyton Rous showed that some tumours, (some cancers) were caused by an ‘unknown’. In the 1930, when Virology was legitimized, researchers began looking back at research that had mysterious ‘unknowns’ as the cause. The work of Francis Peyton Rous came back into focus. The ‘unknown’ was a virus.
Looking back for clues is why researchers do a Review of Literature. This can often lead to that.
Francis Peyton Rous received the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 56 years after his research. The Rous Nobel Prize motivation, “… for his discovery of tumour-inducing viruses”.
That 1910 Rous research has opened the door for 2023 research that utilizes mRNA to fight certain cancers.
All this thanks to curious researchers; a 1960s idea – and a 2003 breakthrough by a couple of persistent Bio-chemists that led to the development of a new type of ‘Vaccine’ in 2020 to fight the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
