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mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 02-23-2021
https://www.macleans.ca/society/science/scientists-mrna-covid-vaccines/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Sixty years ago, the scientists who were pioneering the technology that would make today's
COVID-19 vaccines possible were mocked and dismissed
By Christina Frangou February 18, 2021
mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 02-23-2021
But these fastest vaccines in history have been decades in the making.
They’re the product of generations of scientists who built on one idea after another
and kept at it despite failed experiments, rejections, threats of deportation
a lack of funding and skepticism from contemporaries.
mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 02-23-2021
They were inspired by the discovery of DNA:
in 1951, a young English physical chemist named Rosalind Franklin took X-ray photographs that captured
DNA’s helical shape; two years later, James Watson and Francis Crick of Cambridge University
published the first report describing DNA’s double helix for which they received the Nobel Prize.
(Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958; her contributions were largely overlooked in her lifetime.)
And they were driven not by a race to halt a raging pathogen
or by the chance to patent a multi-billion-dollar drug, but by one big, irresistible question:
What makes life?
mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 02-23-2021
DNA resides in the nucleus, a compartment barricaded off from the rest of the cell by a membrane.
On the other side of the membrane is the cytoplasm, a gelatinous liquid that fills the remainder of the cell.
This is the home of tiny granules called ribosomes, which house RNA.
mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 02-23-2021
French scientists discovered that cells made proteins through the ribosomes.
DNA, despite holding the critical codes for life, is a relatively passive molecule.
Ribosomes do the busy labour, building proteins to carry out the biological processes of survival.
The question was how?
mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 02-23-2021
One of the French scientists, Dr. François Jacob, theorized that there must be an “unstable intermediary”
that went between the DNA and the RNA
—sending messages from the DNA to the RNA, and then disappearing.
called this theoretical intermediary “X.”
Other researchers “rolled their eyes in horror” Jacob recalled in his memoir, The Statue Within.
mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 02-23-2021
Jacob wrote in his memoir: “Suddenly, Sydney gives a hoot. He leaps up, yelling
‘The magnesium! It’s the magnesium!’
They raced back to the lab to run the experiment one last time, with additional magnesium.
The result was spectacular.
X existed.
mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 02-23-2021
When the trio published their findings in 1961 :
they renamed X as messenger RNA.
mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 09-06-2021
[quoteketchim]
https://www.macleans.ca/society/science/scientists-mrna-covid-vaccines/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Sixty years ago, the scientists who were pioneering the technology that would make today's COVID-19 vaccines possible were mocked and dismissed[/quote]
We could have save a LOTTA Lives
But there are a lotta STUPID people
and Conspiracy Theorists out there
mRNA Vaccine : 60 years ago ! - ketchim - 09-14-2021
I still cannot believe People !!