The Facts
- Two University of Pennsylvania scientists, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research that directly led to the first mRNA COVID vaccines.
- Karikó — an adjunct professor at UPenn's Perelman School of Medicine — was a Senior Vice President at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals, which helped produce the vaccines. Meanwhile, Weissman is the director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation.
- The pair's first seminal work, published in 2005, described how they overcame obstacles to using in vitro synthetic mRNA technology, such as an inflammatory response by the body that involves the production of harmful cytokines.
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The Spin
Narrative A
After 30 years of research and almost two decades since their breakthrough on mRNA, Karikó and Weissman deserve the celebration and recognition brought by a Nobel Prize. Without their research, billions of life-saving vaccines wouldn't have existed, and the pandemic may have been far worse than it was. Their mRNA-based invention has already been applied to other vaccines and therapeutics, so we can rest assured the applications of their work won't stop at COVID.
Narrative B
The Nobel Prize is an outdated mode of scientific recognition that was historically, and still remains, biased towards men and those working in the Western world. Additionally, rather than encouraging competition between researchers, the Nobel should be replaced with an award that incentivizes cooperation and values other sciences like mathematics and artificial intelligence as well as medicine and physics.
Metaculus Prediction
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