Nobel Prize Winners Dr. Katalin Karikó and Dr. Drew Weissman | The Story Behind mRNA Vaccines

Everybody who knows us knows that we are very different. I am talkative and bubbling, and Drew is more scientific. You are coming from A to B in a straight line, and I am A to B like that. You told me that. But we try to go to the same place. It's actually funny the way Katie and I met. Back in those days, the only way you could read journal articles is you had to photocopy them out of the journal. And we would fight over the copy machine to be able to read articles. And we started talking and comparing what each other did. I was working with RNA, and I learned all of the immunology from you. We started working on RNA to try and understand why it was so inflammatory. We were both completely open-minded. Any data that we didn't understand, and there was a lot of it, we sat down. We kept doing experiments. We kept getting results. We kept getting excited by the results. Middle of the night, submitting grants, and 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock in the morning, sending each other, and, oh, you are still up, and I am still up. We couldn't have come to the result without both of us being involved. I was making the RNA, and Drew was checking whether it is immunogenic, not immunogenic. Then he gave us the data, and we leaned over, and we tried to understand and make sense of it. Finally, we figured out how to make it non-inflammatory. And then our mind was all over the place. Just going in every direction, thinking a year in the future. We just were amazed that, oh, my God, this is what it means. And after that is when the vaccine field and other RNA fields took off. Coronavirus officially hitting the U.S. Cases here in the U.S. have exploded. All-time highs today in many locations. When we started this, we weren't thinking about curing pandemics. We were thinking about making new vaccines. We had five phase one clinical trials of different mRNA vaccines that we were working on before COVID-19 ever hit. And we knew at that time that this had the potential to be an incredible vaccine. Moderna already tested influenza vaccine, which was mRNA vaccine, two years before. It was just the public didn't know about that. One, two, three. You will not believe how happy I am. Yay! Seeing the phenomenal success of vaccinated people being protected gives me incredible amounts of joy. I was really happy when people wrote me emails and said that they could see their parents and family members. They could meet each other. We haven't thought of all of the things you can do with mRNA. My family, and I'm sure my lab, is mad at me that I didn't celebrate when the phase three clinical trials came in. I had already moved on to something new. We were working on pan-coronavirus vaccines, sickle cell anemia gene therapy, malaria with people across the U.S. and in Africa, leptospirosis with people in Southeast Asia, vaccines for peanut allergies. We're working on really every imaginable infectious disease. I was always interested about this fragile molecule, this RNA, and still today I am following scientists discovering new things and I am just fascinated, just like an exciting crime story. And I am so glad that it eventually helps humanity. I never sit back and rest on laurels. I'm always moving forward. I'm always moving on to the next disease, the next vaccine, the next therapeutic, and that's just the way I think. We worked together a lot, and we had a lot of fun. It was a lot of years, but they weren't boring years. It was very enjoyable. To be a scientist is a joy.