Nobel Prize for Medicine: mRNA research

Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to mRNA researchers.
Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, pioneers of mRNA research.

Katalin Karikó emigrated from Hungary to the U.S. in 1985 when her funding dried up. At the University of Pennsylvania, she was mocked and, in 1995, demoted for persisting with RNA research. I read about this when her work at BioNTech made mRNA vaccines possible. The most famous mRNA vaccine protects against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19.

She shares the prize with immunologist Drew Weissman, whom she met over a photocopier machine at the university, and they hold patents together.

Ironically, the mRNA causes a swift and severe immune reaction that keeps it from creating proteins. Karikó and Weissman discovered that mRNA had to be modified by the substitution of a nucleotide base to reduce the immune reaction and let the vaccine work.

She left the university for BioNTech to put her expertise into practice, and the rest is history!

• News story
• Katalin Karikó
• Drew Weissman
• Covid-19 vaccines

Tree or grass allergies

Ash tree flowers

 

Spring, summer, and fall are all allergy season for some unfortunate people who are allergic to pollen. In spring, it’s early-flowering, wind-pollinated trees. They release large amounts of pollen in hopes that a few grains will find their way to a waiting flower. Because they don’t need to attract insects, they are small and inconspicuous. In summer, the grasses take over — and people can be allergic to both grass and trees. In fall, it’s the weeds such as ragweed. Perhaps due to global warming, the ragweed season has lengthened by almost a month in Canada.

You can read about pollen allergies here.

Weather Network gallery

It’s always good to remember that weather is both heartless and beautiful, to watch out for its vagaries and to enjoy its beauty. The Weather Network Gallery is a good place to browse through hundreds of beautiful images in several categories: scenes of the season, active weather, beautiful weather, animals, gardening, outdoor activities, and travel.

Where would we be without axial tilt?

The world would be a more boring place: we’d have no seasons, no spring and summer, no dead of winter, no dog days of summer, and no Yule celebrations.

White supremacists in U.S. police forces

A little-noted FBI report documented the infiltration of U.S. police forces by organized racists in white supremacist organizations.

Greeting cards for the holidays

Consider ordering some  of these beautiful cards. They are blank inside, so you can craft your own message to each recipient.

 

 

The 1918 Flu Pandemic

The influenza pandemic of 1918-19 killed more people than the Great War. Its cause was unknown at the time, but we now know it to be an H1N1 strain of the virus.

Here’s a brief history: The Flu Pandemic.

Sympathy for the devil

A man that convinced many others that he could use magic to bring a lottery win has been sentenced to a long term in prison.

The Toronto Star devotes a few thousand words to this story, but I’ll confess I have very little sympathy for the victims. The one most prominently mentioned in the story had 105,000 CAD in free cash to spend on this jaw-droppingly stupid scam. The devil (for whom I’m not really sympathetic either; he deliberately fooled gullible people, preying on their mental weakness—evil) was not Bernie Madoff, preying on friendships and moving money around in a Ponzi scheme; this scam was transparently fake from the first words.

Particularly interesting (to me) is how the writer of the Star article somehow treats the victims’ idiocy as a non-issue.