2023-10-02 18:43:31
“The news of the Nobel Prize for medicine awarded to Katalin Karikò and Drew Weissman is a recognition of the enormous contribution that scientific research has guaranteed to all of us during the pandemic. But it is also a hymn to freedom of study and the method of science” . Thus in a note the senator for life and scientist Elena Cattaneo.
“Karikò – recalls the Milanese scholar – was among the first to intuit the treatment potential of mRNA. But 15 years passed before that intuition found its way, during which Hungarian biochemistry resisted both failures and to the difficulties of life. In the 1980s, in fact, when he realized that it would be difficult to continue his studies in his country, he emigrated with his family from Hungary to the United States. It is here that, many years later, he met the immunologist Drew Weissman , and together, in 2005, they understood the mRNA mechanisms currently underlying the anti-Covid-19 vaccines and the study for the development of vaccines against cancer. It took – he continues – almost another decade before, in 2013, Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, founders of the pharmaceutical start-up Biontech, decided to finance their idea, but all this time did not pass in vain: in 2020 studies on mRNA were already at such an advanced point as to allow them to deliver to the world a anti-Covid vaccine in less than a year”.
“Passion and stubbornness, freedom of movement anywhere in the world and hospitality are the ingredients of this extraordinary story crowned, today, by the Nobel. Research – concludes the senator – needs ideas to always be free to travel, to be experimented, to be put into competition and evaluated. The absence of this freedom not only compresses our possibility of knowledge, but also endangers individual and public health”
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