lpetrich
Contributor
Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 - NobelPrize.org
Awarded to
In 1796, Edward Jenner showed that inducing a case of cowpox makes one immune to smallpox. Another name for cowpox is vaccinia, thus "vaccination". Nearly two centuries later, mass vaccination enabled the end of smallpox outside of labs, and there are arguments about whether to destroy the last remaining stocks of the smallpox virus -- it would be deliberately causing the extinction of a species.
Vaccination has proved to be a very effective preventive measure, making many diseases much rarer in us and in domestic-animal species, and many vaccines are very safe.
There are several ways of making vaccines.
The third one became feasible with recombinant-DNA technology -- one makes some surface protein of the target organism by injecting the gene for that protein into some convenient organism, an organism that these makes that protein from that gene. The organism can be some organism in a factory, or else a "vector", a harmless virus that infects our cells, making them produce the protein from that gene.
The fourth one is making copies of such a gene itself and making our bodies make those proteins from those genes.
Awarded to
Vaccination has come a long way over the centuries. It started out as inoculation, based on the observation that someone who recovers from smallpox never suffers from that disease again. Inoculation was injection with a scab from a smallpox patient, in the hope of causing a mild case of smallpox. But it sometimes caused a much worse case of smallpox.Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19
The discoveries by the two Nobel Laureates were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020. Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.
In 1796, Edward Jenner showed that inducing a case of cowpox makes one immune to smallpox. Another name for cowpox is vaccinia, thus "vaccination". Nearly two centuries later, mass vaccination enabled the end of smallpox outside of labs, and there are arguments about whether to destroy the last remaining stocks of the smallpox virus -- it would be deliberately causing the extinction of a species.
Vaccination has proved to be a very effective preventive measure, making many diseases much rarer in us and in domestic-animal species, and many vaccines are very safe.
There are several ways of making vaccines.
- Weakened but still living target
- Killed target
- Target parts
- Genetic instructions for making target parts
The third one became feasible with recombinant-DNA technology -- one makes some surface protein of the target organism by injecting the gene for that protein into some convenient organism, an organism that these makes that protein from that gene. The organism can be some organism in a factory, or else a "vector", a harmless virus that infects our cells, making them produce the protein from that gene.
The fourth one is making copies of such a gene itself and making our bodies make those proteins from those genes.