Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. This is the beginning of Nobel Prize week.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for developing the mRNA technology behind Covid vaccination. Hungarian-born American biochemist Karikó and American immunologist Weissman provided important basic research, notably discoveries about the modification of nucleoside bases, which allowed the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19.
Two years ago, Karikó told “Presse” how he laid the foundations for mRNA: “I have been working with mRNA for forty years, the result of this decades-long research work is comparable to the expedition to Mars. There too, there are decades of preparatory work associated with setbacks. But we scientists are not going to give up. We cannot allow this. So we continue researching, improving, following new paths and one day success will come. I originally developed messenger RNA for therapeutic purposes. My colleague Drew Weissman showed me that the RNA I produced was inflammatory. RNA viruses consist of four building blocks that can be interchanged depending on the disease. My team and I managed to configure one of the four building blocks of RNA. This laid the foundation for mRNA.”
The announcement was made by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday. Last year, the award went to Swedish researcher Svante Pääbo, who works in Germany, for his groundbreaking discoveries about human evolution. Pääbo is a true star in his field, the analysis of ancient DNA sequences – and in doing so has brought us closer to Neanderthals.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine traditionally begins the annual awards ceremony. In the coming days, the other Nobel Prize winners will be announced in the categories of physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics. The Nobel Peace Prize is the only one that is not announced in Stockholm, but in Oslo. The Nobel Prizes will all be ceremoniously awarded on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the inventor of dynamite and prize donor, Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).
This year, the awards include a monetary prize of eleven million Swedish kronor (around 950 thousand euros) per category. This represents one million crowns more than in previous years. (APA/dpa)