1. Meet Katalin Karico

It is an inspiring story. And a most relevant one for now and going forward. It's my honor to introduce you to Katalin Karico, if you have never heard of her. I hadn't until yesterday.

There is no doubt in my mind she will win a Nobel Prize some day.

2. The pioneering Dr. Katalin Kariko — who fled Communist-run Hungary at 30 for the US in 1985 with $1,200 hidden inside her 2-year-old daughter’s teddy bear — isn’t as powerful or rich as Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel or BioNTech’s Ugur Sahin. Nor has she ever been celebrated.
3. Kariko’s obsessive 40 years of research into synthetic messenger RNA was long thought to be a boring dead-end. She said she was chronically overlooked, scorned, fired, demoted, repeatedly refused government and corporate grants, and threatened with deportation.
4. All along, though, Kariko held fast to her belief in mRNA, which has turned out to be key to building the complicated technology behind the new vaccines developed by Moderna and Germany’s BioNTech (which has teamed with Pfizer.)
5. The co-inventor of modified mRNA, Katalin Karikó is finally getting her moment. She remembers sitting in her father’s butcher shop as a little girl, unafraid of the blood and entrails.
6. She’d sit in the small store in Hungary, watching animal after animal get chopped up and sold to customers. Just sitting, just curious about the inner workings of living beings. It’s that innate curiosity that’s driven Karikó throughout her entire scientific career.
7. The road to the discovery that’s come to define her research was not always smooth. Karikó first came to the United States in 1985, taking a job at the University of Pennsylvania. She had been focusing on mRNA technology even then.
8. Despite submitting her first mRNA therapy application in 1989, she couldn’t get any grant funding to develop it. After a few years, Karikó’s bosses at UPenn demoted her. But Karikó kept plugging away at the research, convinced of the technology’s potential.
9. Eventually, she teamed up with one of her colleagues at Penn, Drew Weissman, and came up with a solution to the immune response problem — by modifying one of the nucleosides that make up the RNA.
10. In 2006, she and Weissman used the basis of that discovery to found a company called RNARx, where Karikó served as CEO. By the time their patent for the technology was accepted in 2012, however, Penn sublicensed it out to another company.
11. A few months later, Moderna — which at the time was still a nascent Flagship biotech — signed a $240 million deal with AstraZeneca to develop a VEGF mRNA.
12. Those blows essentially forced Karikó’s outfit to close up shop, and Kariko herself decided she’d had enough of academia. She took a role at BioNTech soon after as senior vice president.
13. Now that mRNA vaccines are two of the leading candidates in the race for a Covid-19 cure at BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, whose technology is based on her old patent, Karikó is happy that her research is a part of the answer.
14. “I wish to tell some of those people who put me down and ridiculed me and whatnot, ‘You see?’” Karikó says. “But that’s OK. I am happy that the two leading mRNA vaccines, Moderna and BioNTech with Pfizer products, both of them are including something that I contributed."
15. "Other people may never even know because Moderna usually says that they discovered everything, but they did pay for that patent and sublicensed it from Penn.”
16. The technology that Karikó co-invented could end up saving thousands of lives and has significant ramifications in areas outside Covid-19. Karikó originally aimed to develop an HIV vaccine, but mRNA-based therapies have popped up in other rare diseases and certain cancers.
17. Regardless of what comes next for mRNA, it’s already had a huge impact on the biotech and pharmaceutical world. Notably, Moderna’s co-founder Derrick Rossi has called for Karikó and Weissman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their mRNA research.
18. And for the next generation of women in biotech, Karikó wants them to know that you don’t have to choose between a career and your family.
19. Karikó remembers several instances where she’d be asked who her boss was, as many simply assumed that the “woman with the accent” had to report to somebody else. But the times are changing.

More from For later read

1. The death of Silicon Valley, a thread

How did Silicon Valley die? It was killed by the internet. I will explain.

Yesterday, my friend IRL asked me "Where are good old days when techies were


2. In the "good old days" Silicon Valley was about understanding technology. Silicon, to be precise. These were people who had to understand quantum mechanics, who had to build the near-miraculous devices that we now take for granted, and they had to work

3. Now, I love libertarians, and I share much of their political philosophy. But you have to be socially naive to believe that it has a chance in a real society. In those days, Silicon Valley was not a real society. It was populated by people who understood quantum mechanics

4. Then came the microcomputer revolution. It was created by people who understood how to build computers. One borderline case was Steve Jobs. People claimed that Jobs was surrounded by a "reality distortion field" - that's how good he was at understanding people, not things

5. Still, the heroes of Silicon Valley were the engineers. The people who knew how to build things. Steve Jobs, for all his understanding of people, also had quite a good understanding of technology. He had a libertarian vibe, and so did Silicon Valley
Ester Ranzen/ Childline/BBC/Saville/Mandelson 👀👇


1. 'MYSTERIOUS ESTHER RANTZEN' ..2017
https://t.co/aBsJL2Avqd


2. (Let's This Party Started) Keith Vaz and Ester Ranzen.


3. 'BBC'S ESTHER RANTZEN LINKED TO ELM GUEST HOUSE' https://t.co/a064KgW8LJ


4. Esther Rantzen is quizzed about Jimmy Savile - 2012

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प्राचीन काल में गाधि नामक एक राजा थे।उनकी सत्यवती नाम की एक पुत्री थी।राजा गाधि ने अपनी पुत्री का विवाह महर्षि भृगु के पुत्र से करवा दिया।महर्षि भृगु इस विवाह से बहुत प्रसन्न हुए और उन्होने अपनी पुत्रवधु को आशीर्वाद देकर उसे कोई भी वर मांगने को कहा।


सत्यवती ने महर्षि भृगु से अपने तथा अपनी माता के लिए पुत्र का वरदान मांगा।ये जानकर महर्षि भृगु ने यज्ञ किया और तत्पश्चात सत्यवती और उसकी माता को अलग-अलग प्रकार के दो चरू (यज्ञ के लिए पकाया हुआ अन्न) दिए और कहा कि ऋतु स्नान के बाद तुम्हारी माता पुत्र की इच्छा लेकर पीपल का आलिंगन...

...करें और तुम भी पुत्र की इच्छा लेकर गूलर वृक्ष का आलिंगन करना। आलिंगन करने के बाद चरू का सेवन करना, इससे तुम दोनो को पुत्र प्राप्ति होगी।परंतु मां बेटी के चरू आपस में बदल जाते हैं और ये महर्षि भृगु अपनी दिव्य दृष्टि से देख लेते हैं।

भृगु ऋषि सत्यवती से कहते हैं,"पुत्री तुम्हारा और तुम्हारी माता ने एक दुसरे के चरू खा लिए हैं।इस कारण तुम्हारा पुत्र ब्राह्मण होते हुए भी क्षत्रिय सा आचरण करेगा और तुम्हारी माता का पुत्र क्षत्रिय होकर भी ब्राह्मण सा आचरण करेगा।"
इस पर सत्यवती ने भृगु ऋषि से बड़ी विनती की।


सत्यवती ने कहा,"मुझे आशीर्वाद दें कि मेरा पुत्र ब्राह्मण सा ही आचरण करे।"तब महर्षि ने उसे ये आशीर्वाद दे दिया कि उसका पुत्र ब्राह्मण सा ही आचरण करेगा किन्तु उसका पौत्र क्षत्रियों सा व्यवहार करेगा। सत्यवती का एक पुत्र हुआ जिसका नाम जम्दाग्नि था जो सप्त ऋषियों में से एक हैं।