23 ms·
Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
- coolhand2120 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- strangesmells02 3y agoLike the Oscars and Grammy's, the Nobel Prize is based as much on cultural significance as it is on the quality of the product. Lobotomies also won the Nobel Prize because they were a cultural phenomenon of the day. JFKs sister got a lobotomy. So even if these one and a half year old treatments prove to have significant long-term side effects there's still the recognition of the cultural and historical significance.
- Geekette 3y agoDr. Kariko’s experience makes me wonder how many other potentially groundbreaking research nodes are being ignored and whether organizations like YC actually have adequate mechanisms to identify such potential bio-science startups. "Dr. Kariko’s struggles to stay afloat in academia have a familiar ring to scientists. She needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful. She did not get them, even as more mundane research was rewarded. “When your idea is against the conventional wisdom that makes sense to the star chamber, it is very hard to break out,” said Dr. David Langer ... Leading scientific journals rejected their work. When the research finally was published, in Immunity, it got little attention. ... “We talked to pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists. No one cared,” Dr. Weissman said. “We were screaming a lot, but no one would listen.[1]” [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-k...
- anonporridge 3y agoOf course they are. Almost every groundbreaking idea that surfaced went through a period of obscurity and dismissal.
- thomasahle 3y agoAre you saying this is a fact of life, or that it is true by definition? Like, "any idea, to be truly groundbreaking, can not be easily distinguished from noise / crackpot theories".
- whatisyour 3y agoIt's surprisingly difficult to look at an idea and figure out from first principles if its any good. Most of the scientists (and people really) rely on comparing it with what they have already seen and using their experiences from things they know to judge the new idea. So, its really difficult to judge a revolutionary theory. Crackpot theories are easier to judge however. They often have very provable falsehoods.
- inglor_cz 3y ago"any idea, to be truly groundbreaking, can not be easily distinguished from noise / crackpot theories" This is an interesting insight. Yeah, I think you are onto something here. Groundbreaking ideas, as opposed to new technologies, tend not to have obvious real world applications/results for years. As such, they aren't easily distinguishable from random crackpottery. We tend to validate ideas by their later applications, or, at the very least, a heap of corroborating evidence. Both takes a lot of time to aggregate.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt's practically a tautology, if the idea was easily distinguishable from 'random crackpottery' then it wouldn't be so groundbreaking, because it necessitates that the other party in a 30 to 60 minute meeting could confidently distinguish it.
- maronato 3y ago
- Lionga 3y agoIt mostly shows that gov. funded research grants are broken and just fund echo chambers. Even if it was not easy pharmaceutical companies finally did invest.
- funcDropShadow 3y ago> It mostly shows that gov. funded research grants are broken and just fund echo chambers. No, it shows there are weaknesses in the government-funded research grants. But it is far from clear which other system would be better overall not just in this case.
- hintymad 3y ago"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it" -- Max Planck
- m463 3y agoMakes me think of that Feynman commencement speech - hopefully we can get better: We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease. https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
- bsder 3y agoWhile it's a nice story, I seem to remember that it isn't true. There was some article a while back that talked about the fact that measurements from the oil drop experiment pretty much moved as the input data got better.
- emmelaich 3y agoAs far as I know, the story is true. If the input data just got better, you'd expect measurements above and below the real value. IIRC, the experimental value went in one direction, from Millikan's to the currently accepted value.
- deepsun 3y ago> She needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful. You cannot even realize how many people in academia are running for wild and fanciful ideas. Don't blame the scientists, they are probably the most open-minded to the new ideas. But filtering out bad ideas is a part of their job, and they grew thick-skinned from constant bombardment of fancy ideas, we cannot pursue them all. So I'd say this story is pretty traditional in the history of revolutionary ideas (e.g. a similar story of John Snow vs. cholera -- how many years and lives it took).
- sn9 3y agoAs an aside, this is maddening: "Published April 8, 2021 Updated Oct. 2, 2023, 9:59 a.m. ET" The original article is gone! Just an constantly evolving page that likely has things deleted for reasons other than accuracy (e.g., like narrative coherency). Just write another article! Damn!
- nathancahill 3y agoInteresting. I diffed the original with the current. They added this paragraph: > On Monday, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their research. And added "Long Overlooked" to the title.
- manicennui 3y agoYC is basically a non-entity when it comes to such startups.
- civilitty 3y agoFor good reason. YC has no business investing in biotech because that’s how we get shit like Theranos. The biotech VC industry is mature with as much or more deal flow in dollars than software VC every year, with tons of people with experience in science and entrepreneurship.
- throwaway2037 3y agoThe pipeline for fundamental biology research is much longer and more complex compared to pure tech. This is the reason why there are so many fewer bio-tech start-ups. The same can be said about hardware vs software in pure tech. There must be 100x start-ups in software, compared to hardware. The greatest hope for more break-thrus that can be commercialised is an increase in gov't research funding (say: 10x) and/or the gov't offering bounties with guaranteed contracts for commercial products. Example: If you can create a malaria vaccine with 75% efficacy for children under 12, then US/EU/Japan/UN will guarantee an order for 25B USD or 1B doses. (Something enormous, to really move the needle.) Wiki tells me that she started publishing about mRNA in 2005. The first mRNA vaccine was not approved until Dec 2022. That kind of timeline is impossible for private investment to fund. It needs to come from gov'ts and non-profits.
- nojvek 3y agoVery well deserved. The more we understand how RNA/DNA are able to build proteins, which then assemble into cell parts, into cells into rest of biology, the more we control our future. I wish I’m alive to see the day when we have cheap DNA compilers and molecular assemblers. Design in CAD and a machine grows it out from a mixture of molecules in water.
- gergely 3y agoyet another hungarian nobel prize winner who managed to get it while left hungary long ago. yet hungarians going to be proud of her. this country such a shame.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sabujp 3y agogood! predicted this would happen 2 years ago
- ngcc_hk 3y agoIs that always that clear in the press release?
- sergiogjr 3y agoNobel prize recognising effort and intent, not outcome. Didn't stop infection. Didn't stop transmission. Adverse effects overlooked and long term ones unknown.
- standeven 3y agoThere have been millions of lives saved, and the studies I’ve seen show far more adverse effects and worse long term outlooks for the unvaccinated. So no, this Nobel prize awards outcome as well.
- EchoReflection 3y agodepaywalled version: https://archive.vn/2023.10.02-162231/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html https://archive.vn/2023.10.02-162231/https://www.nytimes.com...
- didntknowya 3y agoi wouldn't say she was ignored. this was an important but incremental research. people always assume that landmark discoveries are immediately obvious but really it only appears so after the accumulation of numerous research built on top of it. thomas kuhn wrote that knowledge builds up to a tipping point where the collective intelligence begins a paradigm shift and realize that "oh yea... that was a major discovery"
- epistasis 3y agoWell deserved. I've been following mRNA vaccines since long before the pandemic because of an interest in cancer therapeutic vaccines, and the technology is amazing and it took sooooo much fight to bring it forward to production. The speed and flexibility of the tech really is a huge advancement.
- trebligdivad 3y agoTypo in title! Nobel Prize
- xeonmc 3y agoNoble Price
- reqo 3y agoAre COVID-19 vaccines the first successful mRNA-based vaccines? Seems to me there should be some other successful application of mRNA when it comes to vaccines/medications even before COVID-19. In that case, how much more complex was it to create a vaccine for COVID-19 specifically?
- dbcooper 3y agoNot exactly the same, but Onpattro, an siRNA medication encapsulated in a similar formulation of lipid nanoparticles, for the treatment of ATTR was approved in 2018.
- pavlov 3y agoThe Covid-19 vaccine was the first mRNA vaccine brought to market. That's part of why there were so many conspiracy theories surrounding it.
- passwordoops 3y agoEven if they were market established, there would always have been conspiracy theories about any vaccines. It's about a worldview shaping your reality
- logicchains 3y agoIt's about incentives: vaccines are one of the only products where manufacturers are completely immune from liability, and given big pharma's historical willingness to priotise profit over lives, it's hard to just trust them. Especially when the reason big pharma lobbied for that liability immunity was because they claimed they'd be sued into bankruptcy without it.
- astrange 3y agoGenX "big whatever" / "evil corporations" leftism is completely dead at this point. People should drop it since it only ever brings them to incorrect conclusions. If you want an evil corporation, it's the small ones that are usually the worst.
- sytelus 3y agoIn the times when so many people are up in arms against covid vaccines, we keep forgetting how things were and how these vaccines allowed to open up en-mass. Yes, there were problems but number of lives saved is just awe inspiring.
- dalore 3y ago[flagged]
- dekhn 3y agoAre you a scientist, or otherwise qualified to make judgements like this? I see a lot of armchair quarterbacks making statements about public health, but it ussually ends up being poorly informed speculation.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoOh there's certainly moral hazard for all of the muppets that fell in line with the interlocking "reopen" astroturf campaigns that cropped up during the lockdown, but it isn't due to false or misleading claims about vaccine efficacy. It was made clear from jump that 1. the vaccines did not confer perfect immunity and 2. continuous mutation meant the goalposts for protection were moving. Individuals that chose to accept either the narrative that we were all perfectly safe once vaccinated or that there was nothing to worry about in the first place because it was all a giant conspiracy are collectively responsible for Covid making the transition from pandemic to endemic.
- astrange 3y agoIt's impossible that covid could ever have not become endemic. It can transmit through animals, we're not going to vaccinate or kill all the animals, and we haven't found the source it actually came from.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoBullshit. There was a window of time where hard quarantine could have prevented it. Instead we got politics.
- 77ko 3y agoThis was a good interview with her: https://josephnoelwalker.com/147-katalin-kariko/ https://josephnoelwalker.com/147-katalin-kariko/ She had a very interesting life, I hope she writes a memoir. Edit: She has a memoir out 10th Oct: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706251/breaking-through-by-katalin-kariko/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706251/breaking-thr...
- pciexpgpu 3y agoFantastic interview. Always love great branching off points from HN.
- swyx 3y agoher journey to mRNA was full of adversity too. the NYT podcast with her was great coverage of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/podcasts/the-daily/mrna-vaccines-katalin-kariko.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/podcasts/the-daily/mrna-v... (my excerpt https://x.com/swyx/status/1490363488824627200?s=20 https://x.com/swyx/status/1490363488824627200?s=20) i cant imagine how it must feel to have her own vaccine injected in her, and know she saved so many lives through her persistence and the rare few that believed in her through her lowest moments.
- agloe_dreams 3y agoIn this very moment, Penguin is getting quotes on getting "Nobel Prize Winning Author" stickers for the books.
- queuebert 3y agoI have a special hatred for "Now a Major Motion Picture" littering book covers.
- NeuroCoder 3y agoEven worse is when they put a picture from the movie on the book cover
- Pixie_Dust 3y ago[flagged]
- H8crilA 3y agoIs this the first practical, mass deployable remote code execution in a human? Or was there something earlier? I particularly enjoyed the unreasonably effective antivirus bypass achieved by slight modification of the payload by introducing pseudouridine (Ψ), which the antivirus had never seen before and therefore ignored. Such a bypass definitely deserves a Nobel Prize!
- xorcist 3y agoThe computer term "virus" was chosen because it has similarities with a virus. Not the other way around...
- slim 3y agosimilarity is bijective
- happytiger 3y agoIt’s kind of exactly what it is tho
- ceejayoz 3y agoRCE, yes. The first ever, no.
- aredox 3y agoAll viruses are "remote code execution" - including vaccines made from weakened viruses or repurposed viral vectors. mRNA tech is just cutting out a lot of cruft and mass-producing and delivering tiny mRNA strands directly.
- gniv 3y agoI don't think weakened viruses go through our protein-making machinery (aka code execution), but directly cause immune system reactions. Edit: I stand corrected.
- ralusek 3y agoThe viral vector vaccines are a very similar development as the mRNA vaccines, and I'm curious as to why they've received less attention as a technological wonder. Brief summary: Goal of vaccine is to get antigens in body in order to stimulate immune response to antigen, ideally at a lower risk than via infection from associated pathogen. - "Traditional" vaccines inject a dead or weakened pathogen. Protein subunit vaccines inject just the antigen(s). Antigen directly put in body Both mRNA and viral vector vaccines, however, are genetic vaccines. Rather than injecting your body with the antigen directly, they inject your body with code (mRNA and DNA, respectively), with the goal of having your own body produce the antigen(s). - mRNA vaccines deliver a snippet of mMRNA via lipid nanoparticles to your cells' cytoplasm, where your ribosomes pick it up and produce and express the antigen themselves - viral vector vaccines deliver a snippet of code via living virus (in the case of COVID vaccines, a living adenovirus delivering a DNA payload) to your cells' nucleus, where your cells reads the DNA, produces mRNA in your cytoplasm, after which it behaves the same as the mRNA vaccines Basically, both the mRNA vaccines and viral vector vaccines are genetic in nature and rely on delivering code to your body rather than antigens. The analogy I've used before is that traditional vaccines are SSR, and the genetic platforms are SPA. I'm just curious as to why mRNA as a platform has been so much more hyped than the viral vectors; they're novel in fundamentally the same exact way.
- inferiorhuman 3y agoLikely due to the limitations and challenges with the viral vaccines. Perhaps the biggest limitation is that the virus used as the vector must be one to which you don't already have immunity. For instance the adenovirus used by the Chinese and Russian vaccines is pretty common in the west, with something nearly half of all Americans have some immunity to it.
- ralusek 3y agoYes, the delivery system definitely has that drawback. However, the lipid nanoparticles as a delivery system have problems of their own, which I laid out in a sibling comment to your own. But my question is more related to the pop-science perception of mRNA vs viral vector. mRNA were presented as new technology, but on media publication after media publication, the viral vectors were presented as the "old"/"traditional" way of doing things. 9/10 people have that understanding of the mRNA vs vv vaccines. The truth is that both are radical departures from existing technologies and they're both genetic platforms very similar in nature, and both completely novel being deployed at this scale.
- trauco 3y agoA good reminder that academic institutions often fail to recognize the best in their ranks. From this NYTimes article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-k... About Dr. Kariko: "But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year"
- f6v 3y ago> A good reminder that academic Unlike industry, where there’s no internal politics and everything is merit-based.
- specialist 3y ago> often fail to recognize the best in their ranks I know it's a dumb cultural cite, but I keep thinking of the "12th man" scene from the movie (book too?) "World War Z". The Israeli is explaining that his job is to disagree with the consensus. Just in case. Who is then given charter and resources to plan accordingly. Just in case. I hope there's many buckets of research funds. With a modest bucket for long shots. And perhaps a smaller bucket for loonie tunes. Where by formalizing that model would preempt all the reactionary "omgherd golden fleece!?" outbursts. As a taxpayer, I'd be thrilled if researchers, artists, journalists, musicians, and misc crazies got some kind of UBI, to do their work without starving. Considering the scale of all the usual waste and pork, genius grants wouldn't be more than a round-off error. With a payout of 1:1000, it'd be a bargain for society. Smartest investments ever.
- wolverine876 3y agoIt seems more as a status issue to me: Kariko had a PhD from Hungary, was a post-doc at Temple U. - not an elite pedigree. At Penn, an elite school: "It was a low-level position, research assistant professor, and never meant to lead to a permanent tenured position." and after that boss left, "Dr. Kariko was left without a lab or financial support. She could stay at Penn only if she found another lab to take her on. “They expected I would quit,” she said. Universities only support low-level Ph.D.s for a limited amount of time, Dr. Langer said: “If they don’t get a grant, they will let them go.” Dr. Kariko “was not a great grant writer,” ... Kariko was slotted into the non-tenure / adjunct role, and it didn't matter what they did. It happens in private industry too. The problem is elitism overlooking talent and production. It's a brazen, obvious flaw. The US long had the culture - imperfect, of course - of an active rejection of elitism, class, etc. 'All men are created equal', 'every man a king', meritocracy, hard work, you can accomplish anything if you work hard enough, the land of opportuity, the American Dream, etc. That equality, the respect for others, is the foundation of voting - you respect everyone's right to have input and its value. The dominant fashion, a sort of neo-reactionaryism, is to reject that, deride it, rather than aggressively moving it forward. Many people look for ways to justify prejudice, to exclude, to embrace personal ego and greed and to mock public good. I think that's because if you embrace universal rights, opportunity, equality, etc., you can't avoid 'liberal' ideals too, and those are the target of reactionaryism.
- j7ake 3y agoMuch deserved and really inspirational story. I wonder if she would have survived today’s even more competitive academic environment. If not then we must wonder how many future Karikos have been silenced by our current academic system.
- lynx23 3y ago[flagged]
- robertlagrant 3y agoI think the peace prize is a totally separate decision-making groups - it's a political award.
- TheBigSalad 3y agoHopefully they're being objective. I don't think they should not recognize it because of a few loud and obnoxious fringe conspiracy theorists.
- anonu 3y agoSo this is the 2005 paper that started it all: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16111635/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16111635/ I often wonder if, as a lay person, I would be capable of understanding the significance of really technical papers like this if I were to randomly start reading. Probably not without the right foundation.
- ramraj07 3y agoSee if you’re able to read the original Yamanaka iPS paper here. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(06)00976-7 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(06)00976-7 I read this as an undergrad and had a blast (inside joke lol). I am considering starting a YouTube channel explaining such breakthroughs while going through the original research. If you’re interested I’ll ping you as focus group when I have some!
- Metacelsus 3y agoI read that one in undergrad, it's a great paper.
- anuvrat1 3y ago2017 lecture by Shinya Yamanaka[0] is really good, much easier to digest too. [0] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=PTkCDDUbsBc https://youtube.com/watch?v=PTkCDDUbsBc
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mnw21cam 3y agoFWIW: BLAST: Basic Local Alignment Search Tool https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
- felipemnoa 3y agoI would love to watch your channel!
- haunter 3y ago[flagged]
- briffid 3y agoIt's you who brought Orban here first, quoting something he didn't say, then refute it. Are you from some kind of propaganda school? Orbán posted this in fact: "My congratulations to the first Hungarian woman winning the Nobel prize. We are proud!"
- rurban 3y agoHere you have it: https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/budapest-mural-pays-tribute-katalin-kariko-hungarian-born-pioneer-behind-covid-2021-08-28/ https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/budapest-mural-pays-tribut... "The future is written by Hungarians" Also related to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
- xkbarkar 3y ago[flagged]
- boredhedgehog 3y ago> What took us out of lockdown in the end was not the vaccines or ht billions spent on them. Not even or the dumb masks and the draconian asinine distancing rules. It was Omicron. Plain and simple. But on the other hand, how much did the vaccination campaign accelerate the emergence of Omicron? I don't think there's any way to tell.
- mellosouls 3y agoPlease don't use praise to smuggle in vaccine misinformation. The vaccines were a (successful) strategy for the population as a whole; their use on low-risk groups was a part of that strategy. While the usefulness of some of the tactics and groups targeted can be debated, isolating them out of that context to push your anti-vax message is extremely misleading.
- stormfather 3y ago[flagged]
- sandworm101 3y agoSuch can be, and has been, said about every vaccine throughout history. Why this one became such a political/religeous issue is beyond me.
- tycho-newman 3y ago> What took us out of lockdown in the end was not the vaccines or the billions spent on them. Not even the dumb masks and the draconian asinine distancing rules. It was Omicron. Plain and simple. The Nobel Prize in vaccine disinformation goes to:
- Garvi 3y agoIt's not hard spotting people that broke quarantine rules for a tiny ego boost. A lot of people died strictly because of it. With all the censorship on other topics on HN, I truly wonder why such medical disinformation is being tolerated and even upvoted. HN is becoming more like Reddit by the day now.
- urduntupu 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stbenjam 3y agoTitle needs fixing: Nobel prize.
- xdennis 3y agoWasn't Robert Malone the inventor of mRNA vaccines? He's kinda kooky now, but I thought his mRNA vaccine work was real.
- Geekette 3y ago"While Malone promotes himself as an inventor of mRNA vaccines,[1][7] credit for the distinction is more often given to the lead authors on the major papers he contributed to (such as Felgner and Wolff), later advances by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman,[3][19] or Moderna co-founder Derrick Rossi.[13] Ultimately, mRNA vaccines were the decades-long result of the contributions of hundreds of researchers, including Malone.[3][20][21] In April 2022, Davey Alba, writing for The New York Times, said that "[w]hile he was involved in some early research into the technology, his role in its creation was minimal at best", citing "half a dozen Covid experts and researchers, including three who worked closely with Dr. Malone."[7] "[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Malone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Malone
- jimmydddd 3y agoI think we need to recognize that sometimes (often?) innovators are "kinda kooky" sometimes. In a different field, folks are surprised that a guy trying to send rockets to Mars is kinda kooky sometimes.
- dav_Oz 3y agoBefore you get downvoted to oblivion. I think it is a fair question. Yes, Robert Malone could be seen as initiating the journey in 1987 [0] but there are a lot of landmark contributors who refined it to the mass-produced mRNA platform of today. As with other Nobel Prizes, it is a far outdated award of the late 19th/early 20th century in which honoring single individuals made some sense. In today's scientific enterprise the high-frequent collaborative effort of different teams all over the world is the norm, so over time it becomes pretty hard to single out individual scientists. The prize winners of today are just widely recognized representatives (and therefore mostly older folks) of a particular successful scientific endeavor so that the public can still relate to the achievements via a personal story what would be otherwise a history lesson involving a lot of important people - and in this case I think Karikó's extraordinary perseverance throughout her science career fits this bill very well without ruffling up some too many feathers. [0]https://archive.ph/xgmnv https://archive.ph/xgmnv
- jononomo 3y agoInteresting -- I just got my fourth covid vaccine, along with a flu shot, yesterday. I got two shots in 2021, one in 2022, and my fourth yesterday. Vaccines are a godsend. Also, I have never had covid.
- Octokiddie 3y agoTitle ("Price") is misspelled.
- gadders 3y agoThis feels a bit premature to me. I'm not convinced that the vaccines are 100% bad but they were a novel technology and I'm not sure we're far enough along to judge them objectively yet. Regardless of how good they are, they were definitely over-sold.
- thfuran 3y agoThe covid vaccines are the trendy thing to talk about with lay people, not the underlying thing the award is for.
- gadders 3y agoIf it's for the underlying technology, rather than a specific implementation, then I'm all for it and it's well deserved.
- tgv 3y agoIMO (but I'm barely more than a layman), mRNA already offers a safer delivery mechanism than previous vaccination methods, and the massive COVID campaigns have revealed much about the virus, but nothing about the vaccination method. The number of deaths due to COVID has been estimated at over 5 million. The fact that it didn't get much higher, and we can stroll about like nothing happened, is already a miracle. Edit: didn't finish... So what is your worry? Sure, there is the possibility of abusing the tech, like any tech. But healthwise?
- gadders 3y agoI misunderstood. I thought the award was for the vaccination, rather than the underlying technology. The technology is definitely worth an award. I think that there is enough "noise" over COVID vaccine side-effects that we don't yet know whether long term it is safe. I also think that given the politicisation of COVID (for instance even discussion of the lab leak theory was gas-lit), I don't think politicians would admit to an issue even if there was one.
- 3y ago
- jmyeet 3y agoI figured there'd be a Nobel Prize for the mRNA vaccines. This is deserved and the further impacts of this are going to be felt for decades. Some background: for many years, the flu vaccine has had what's called the "egg problem". The vaccine is cultivated in chicken eggs in a sterile environment. The US government pays billions every year to maintain these production lines. It takes about 4-5 months to go from choosing what flu strainsa are likely to be prevalent to there being a vaccine. The production line can't scale up quickly either. Also, people who are allergic eggs can't generally take the flu vaccine. That's why they ask you. For decades the US government has funded research to get away from this system and that resulted in the mRNA vaccine. It doesn't require chicken eggs to produce and the lead time for producing a vaccine goes to almost immediate. we saw this with Covid where the candidate vaccines were produced in days. This fed into conspiracy theories about it being unsafe because it was rushed but it was nothing more than the culmination of decades of research where fast vaccine turnaround was the entire point. In future years we'll see mRNA vaccines turned to diseases that have thus far we've been unable to produce vaccines for.
- ifyoubuildit 3y agoI'm hopeful that you're right about the future of the technology. > This fed into conspiracy theories about it being unsafe because it was rushed but it was nothing more than the culmination of decades of research where fast vaccine turnaround was the entire point. That's one interpretation. I wonder if you'd apply that same interpretation to the first few viable aircraft. Surely flight was studied for millennia at the point that the wright brothers got their plane flying. Would you hop in and try to cross the Atlantic on one? Or would you fall prey to conspiracy theories that maybe they hadn't worked out all the kinks yet? edit: I suppose I'm being downvoted for spreading Big Wheel's antiwinger talking points.
- foogazi 3y agoI still think about this when flying, ultimately it’s a choice and you have to trust a whole chain of humans ( pilots, techs, controllers, engineers, suppliers ) doing things the right way - makes you realize flight is really a miracle
- chrisweekly 3y agomods: typo in title "Price" -> "Prize"
- cies 3y ago[flagged]
- brutusborn 3y agoTheir seminal paper was desk rejected by nature - when thinking about this I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
- swyx 3y agonon academic here - what is a "desk rejection"?
- QuesnayJr 3y agoImmediate rejection. Not even worthy for sending out to referees.
- fooker 3y agoRejected without review. Like a recruiter rejecting screening you out without an interview.
- marsa 3y agoa desk rejection is when the editor in chief (or managing editor, or whoever is the one first receiving the submitted paper) decides to reject the submission without sending it out for peer review basically a judgment call by the person in charge of a journal that the paper is not interesting or impactful enough to warrant going through with the rest of the review/publishing process
- swyx 3y agoouch. but also, surely that has to happen to the majority of papers, meaning the snap judgment call of effectively one person greatly colors the quality of the whole process. as a conference organizer this is something i worry about. is there a better process proposed out there - that respects the constraint that high value people have limited time to review things?
- marsa 3y agosadly no, it is an unsolved problem of scholarly publishing imo. on the one hand you have the reputable journals following the traditional publishing process that take pride in their high rejection rates -- these require a large percentage of desk rejections to avoid flooding their reviewers with sub-par papers. thus they'll inevitably have some quality papers fall through the cracks + some flashy sub-par papers making the cut. on the other hand you have the pay-to-publish journals that have a financial incentive to push as many papers through peer review -- these thrive on sub-par papers that are technically just barely 'good enough', but the upside is that the real good ones will also make it through. however, they inevitably face reviewer fatigue, and the most valuable ones will quit reviewing if they often send them low-quality papers. so basically once in a while they'll publish top notch research without being aware of it. i'm not aware of any middle-ground solutions out there and it certainly feels like a tough problem to solve.
- mtalantikite 3y agoFor those that know more than I do, out of curiosity, why would this Nobel go to these two and not also Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin? The four of them shared earlier awards, and it was Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin's BioNTech that got the vaccine to market (after their decades of research). The couple are billionaires, so I'm sure they're doing just fine, but that's gotta hurt to be overlooked for such a major prize when they did so much for that discovery and technology.
- dekhn 3y agoNobel Prizes in Medicine don't award people getting medicines to the market. They exist to reward fundamental discoveries that have high impact.
- mtalantikite 3y agoAbsolutely, and this is more along what I was asking. What about their discovery was deemed the most important part out of this long chain of work that led up to mRNA vaccination and this Nobel? Nature's news section had a history of discoveries a while back [1], and it seems like there is a lot of disagreement about who deserves what credit. Personally, it seems like everyone's contribution is important, but we as humans irrationally want to point to a single thing/event/team and say "this was the cause" rather than stand back and notice how interdependent the whole thing is. In the end I think things like Nobels are pretty silly. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
- dekhn 3y agoHumans are even more irrational! For CRISPR most people expecfted the prize to go to 3 people- Doudna, Charpentier, and Zhang. But Zhang was ommitted and many people think it was because the head of his institution wrote this: https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674%2815%2901705-5 https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674%2815%2901705-5 (the establishment hates Eric Lander, and this was a particularly egregious example of his behavior). But the original discoverer of CRISPR, Francis Mojica, was not awarded the prize. That's because, in my opinion (as well as the Nobel Committee), Doudna and Charpentier played the greatest individual roles in the process of turning the original discovery of CRISPR into a powerful tool (CRISPR/cas9), that is much more general than CRISPR the process that occurs in bacteria. I still think Mojica should have been given the prize, and if 4 recipients were possible, also Zhang.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- daft_pink 3y ago[flagged]