WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.975 --> 00:00:07.334 I think vaccines are misunderstood, and  maybe it's because it seems like magic.   00:00:07.334 --> 00:00:13.440 That simplicity and the mystery of it is something  that ends up creating a lot of skepticism.    00:00:14.400 --> 00:00:17.265 People are fooled by the speed. 00:00:17.358 --> 00:00:22.906 Everything that we knew when it was time to design a vaccine for COVID-19, 00:00:22.906 --> 00:00:26.225 we knew for so long, but the public had just become aware of it. 00:00:26.225 --> 00:00:29.626 If this would happen two years ago, we would not be ready.  00:00:29.626 --> 00:00:34.108 Saying that it happened overnight, it took two, three decades, at least. 00:00:34.441 --> 00:00:39.748 2021 was the year when so many praised the miracle of vaccine development.   00:00:40.720 --> 00:00:44.118 In science, there is hardly ever a simple, quick fix. 00:00:44.118 --> 00:00:47.267 But this was truly a moment of the right fix - 00:00:47.267 --> 00:00:50.105 a brand new kind of vaccine technology - 00:00:50.105 --> 00:00:52.518 at exactly the right time. 00:00:53.329 --> 00:00:56.345 I started out in math, and I moved to biology. 00:00:56.345 --> 00:01:03.718 And after medical school, I saw one of the first cases of HIV in Tennessee back in 1982. 00:01:03.718 --> 00:01:06.518 And so the first part of my career was trying to understand   00:01:06.518 --> 00:01:12.000 the immunology of vaccine-enhanced disease  and trying to make vaccines safer. 00:01:12.454 --> 00:01:16.203 I got interested in science when I was 16 years old. 00:01:16.203 --> 00:01:20.000 I was hooked on the idea that you could go to work   00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:24.387 and discover something that no one else  in the world knows on any given day. 00:01:25.120 --> 00:01:30.896 It seems at 16, I thought that maybe I will be a scientist. 00:01:30.896 --> 00:01:35.906 I was always working with mRNA, I mean for 30 years at least. 00:01:35.906 --> 00:01:40.986 And I never wanted to develop a vaccine. I wanted to develop it for therapy. 00:01:40.986 --> 00:01:44.243 When I first came to Penn from the NIH, 00:01:44.243 --> 00:01:49.880 pure luck hit where I met Kati Karikó over a Xerox machine. 00:01:49.880 --> 00:01:55.519 And she told me she worked on RNA, and she could help us with our vaccine. 00:01:57.280 --> 00:02:01.349 Every experiment doesn't work, every hypothesis isn't good. 00:02:01.349 --> 00:02:05.001 It was a continuous flow of negative feedback. 00:02:05.001 --> 00:02:11.307 But we saw the potential of the RNA and neither of us would give up. 00:02:11.307 --> 00:02:17.841 Although  mRNA can teach our cells to fight infection,  it took doctors Karikó and Weissman 00:02:17.841 --> 00:02:22.976 16 years to  figure out how to use it safely in a vaccine. 00:02:22.976 --> 00:02:27.547 First when I made this RNA, actually I did not tell Drew Weissman, my colleague, 00:02:27.547 --> 00:02:29.800 because I thought that maybe I mixed up something. 00:02:29.800 --> 00:02:35.709 So I repeated the experiment and we could see that  there was no inflammation in human cells. 00:02:35.709 --> 00:02:41.040 We're both scientists. We're not baseball players  who cheer when we hit a homerun. 00:02:41.040 --> 00:02:43.216 We knew that it had great potential. 00:02:43.216 --> 00:02:46.348 But what we thought about is what are we going to do with it? 00:02:47.040 --> 00:02:54.134 Meanwhile, doctors Corbett and Graham spent years  unlocking the structural secrets of viruses. 00:02:54.134 --> 00:03:01.920 One of the really important problems in coronaviruses  that had not been solved is really simple.   00:03:01.920 --> 00:03:06.829 What does the coronavirus really look like to the immune system? 00:03:06.829 --> 00:03:13.084 And to figure that out, you have to be able to take a really high definition picture 00:03:13.084 --> 00:03:16.945 of the proteins that are on the surface of the coronavirus. 00:03:16.945 --> 00:03:21.748 And then do some protein engineering to stabilize the structure. 00:03:21.748 --> 00:03:31.865 At that moment,  you realize that you have almost what is a  universal strategy for creating a vaccine for coronaviruses. 00:03:32.664 --> 00:03:38.878 A mysterious respiratory illness with similarities to SARS has healthcare workers around the world on alert. 00:03:40.223 --> 00:03:44.906 What we said to each other, all's we need is a sequence and we're ready to go. 00:03:44.906 --> 00:03:49.786 We can make a vaccine in weeks and get it into people very quickly.   00:03:52.080 --> 00:03:56.000 The fact that we made a vaccine in 10 months,   00:03:56.000 --> 00:04:01.298 and has the potential to end this pandemic, will certainly stand out. 00:04:01.298 --> 00:04:03.556 "Do it mama!" (laughter) 00:04:04.640 --> 00:04:09.575 Most scientists never get to see a product actually used.  00:04:09.575 --> 00:04:14.730 And to watch the evening news and see the relief on healthcare providers getting immunized, 00:04:14.730 --> 00:04:15.988 those were special moments. 00:04:16.681 --> 00:04:22.509 I also get emotional when I got a letter from an elderly home, 00:04:22.509 --> 00:04:26.898 and they reported that they received the vaccine. 00:04:26.898 --> 00:04:30.230 There were like 200 elderly in that home. 00:04:30.230 --> 00:04:32.536 And nobody died. 00:04:34.160 --> 00:04:40.960 On social media, when children were going  back to visiting their grandparents again.   00:04:40.960 --> 00:04:47.576 Seeing people reunited in that way, it was a very surreal moment. 00:04:48.508 --> 00:04:55.450 A surreal moment, and definitely worth celebrating, if only briefly before a return to work. 00:04:55.957 --> 00:05:01.637 These scientists are now trying to apply their game-changing discoveries to other diseases.  00:05:01.637 --> 00:05:04.375 Influenza, even cancer. 00:05:04.948 --> 00:05:09.563 A brand new way to make a healthier, more equitable world.