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

The Nobel prize 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.