In an ugly world, vaccines are a beautiful gift worth honouring

The NobelRNARNA prize , awarded on October 2nd to Katalin Karikó, a biochemist, and Drew Weissman, an immunologist, is a fitting capstone to a great underdog story. Dr Karikó’s unfashionable insistence on trying to get into cells set back her career. She persisted, and the two developed a technique which allowed the to be primed against threats in an entirely new way. When the hit, the m vaccines they had made possible saved millions of lives—and freed billions more to live normally again.Their prize is unusual. The only previous scientist to have won a Nobel prize in the context of vaccination was Max Theiler, who discovered the attenuated strain of the yellow-fever virus which has been used as a vaccine since the 1930s. Neither Jonas Salk nor Albert Sabin was rewarded for developing polio vaccines. The eradication of smallpox went uncelebrated, too.