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

livemint.com:

for medicine, 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 RNA into cells set back her career. She persisted, and the two developed a technique which allowed the immune system to be primed against threats in an entirely new way.

When the covid-19 pandemic hit, the mRNA 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. Given that Alfred Nobel’s will calls for the prizes to go to those who have conferred the greatest benefit on humankind, this poor record is undeserved.

But although they may have gone without trips to Stockholm, nice fat cheques and 175g gold medals portraying an entrepreneur in explosives, vaccine scientists can contemplate something even better. As the inscription to Christopher Wren in St Paul’s Cathedral puts it: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice (If you seek his monument, look around you). The vaccine-makers’ work is commemorated in hundreds of millions of lives.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that vaccines have saved more from death than any other medical invention. It is a hard claim to gainsay. Vaccines protect people from disease cheaply, reliably and in remarkable numbers.