Karikó and Weissman receive the Nobel Prize

The Nobel Committee awarded Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman the Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the nucleoside modification discovered in 2005, the single change that let synthetic mRNA avoid triggering a damaging immune reaction. The prize came 18 years after the original discovery and three years after it had already been used in vaccines given to billions of people, an unusually direct line from a basic lab finding to a proven, widely deployed medicine.