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After reading the article, consider how exploring new frontiers in science and technology helps humanity. Post two to three words identifying areas of human life that are helped when pioneers push new frontiers in science and technology.

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“Could a nuclear bomb’s x-rays save Earth from a killer asteroid?”

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“Could a nuclear bomb’s x-rays save Earth from a killer asteroid?”

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Read the article to see how scientists at the earth's frontiers are finding ways to keep us safe.

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Could a nuclear bomb’s X-rays save Earth from a killer asteroid?

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Radiation from a nuclear explosion can vaporize the surface of an asteroid and change its trajectory, a new study finds.

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Read the profile above to start off your group work. You may conduct further Google searches or consult ChatGPT to better understand your chosen pioneer and the impacts of their innovation. Answer the questions below:

1. What was the innovation developed by these pioneers?

2. What were the impacts of their innovation on humanity?

3. What were some of the challenges these pioneers faced?

4. In your view, what do you think motivated your pioneer to explore this frontier?

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Entrepreneur. CEO of OpenAI, company who invented ChatGPT

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Sam Altman Is the Oppenheimer of Our Age

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He insists the artificial intelligence he is creating could destroy civilization even as he hastens its advancement. Do we know enough about him?

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Read the profile above to start off your group work. You may conduct further Google searches or consult ChatGPT to better understand your chosen pioneer and the impacts of their innovation. Answer the questions below:

1. What was the innovation developed by these pioneers?

2. What were the impacts of their innovation on humanity?

3. What were some of the challenges these pioneers faced?

4. In your view, what do you think motivated your pioneer to explore this frontier?

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Inventors of the mRNA vaccines

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Press release

2023-10-02
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet
has today decided to award

the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

jointly to

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.

Vaccines before the pandemic

Vaccination stimulates the formation of an immune response to a particular pathogen. This gives the body a head start in the fight against disease in the event of a later exposure. Vaccines based on killed or weakened viruses have long been available, exemplified by the vaccines against polio, measles, and yellow fever. In 1951, Max Theiler was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing the yellow fever vaccine.

Thanks to the progress in molecular biology in recent decades, vaccines based on individual viral components, rather than whole viruses, have been developed. Parts of the viral genetic code, usually encoding proteins found on the virus surface, are used to make proteins that stimulate the formation of virus-blocking antibodies. Examples are the vaccines against the hepatitis B virus and human papillomavirus. Alternatively, parts of the viral genetic code can be moved to a harmless carrier virus, a "vector." This method is used in vaccines against the Ebola virus. When vector vaccines are injected, the selected viral protein is produced in our cells, stimulating an immune response against the targeted virus.

Producing whole virus-, protein- and vector-based vaccines requires large-scale cell culture. This resource-intensive process limits the possibilities for rapid vaccine production in response to outbreaks and pandemics. Therefore, researchers have long attempted to develop vaccine technologies independent of cell culture, but this proved challenging.

mRNA vaccines: A promising idea

In our cells, genetic information encoded in DNA is transferred to messenger RNA (mRNA), which is used as a template for protein production. During the 1980s, efficient methods for producing mRNA without cell culture were introduced, called in vitro transcription. This decisive step accelerated the development of molecular biology applications in several fields. Ideas of using mRNA technologies for vaccine and therapeutic purposes also took off, but roadblocks lay ahead. In vitro transcribed mRNA was considered unstable and challenging to deliver, requiring the development of sophisticated carrier lipid systems to encapsulate the mRNA. Moreover, in vitro-produced mRNA gave rise to inflammatory reactions. Enthusiasm for developing the mRNA technology for clinical purposes was, therefore, initially limited.

These obstacles did not discourage the Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó, who was devoted to developing methods to use mRNA for therapy. During the early 1990s, when she was an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, she remained true to her vision of realizing mRNA as a therapeutic despite encountering difficulties in convincing research funders of the significance of her project. A new colleague of Karikó at her university was the immunologist Drew Weissman. He was interested in dendritic cells, which have important functions in immune surveillance and the activation of vaccine-induced immune responses. Spurred by new ideas, a fruitful collaboration between the two soon began, focusing on how different RNA types interact with the immune system.

The breakthrough

Karikó and Weissman noticed that dendritic cells recognize in vitro transcribed mRNA as a foreign substance, which leads to their activation and the release of inflammatory signaling molecules. They wondered why the in vitro transcribed mRNA was recognized as foreign while mRNA from mammalian cells did not give rise to the same reaction. Karikó and Weissman realized that some critical properties must distinguish the different types of mRNA.

RNA contains four bases, abbreviated A, U, G, and C, corresponding to A, T, G, and C in DNA, the letters of the genetic code. Karikó and Weissman knew that bases in RNA from mammalian cells are frequently chemically modified, while in vitro transcribed mRNA is not. They wondered if the absence of altered bases in the in vitro transcribed RNA could explain the unwanted inflammatory reaction. To investigate this, they produced different variants of mRNA, each with unique chemical alterations in their bases, which they delivered to dendritic cells. The results were striking: The inflammatory response was almost abolished when base modifications were included in the mRNA. This was a paradigm change in our understanding of how cells recognize and respond to different forms of mRNA. Karikó and Weissman immediately understood that their discovery had profound significance for using mRNA as therapy. These seminal results were published in 2005, fifteen years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In further studies published in 2008 and 2010, Karikó and Weissman showed that the delivery of mRNA generated with base modifications markedly increased protein production compared to unmodified mRNA. The effect was due to the reduced activation of an enzyme that regulates protein production. Through their discoveries that base modifications both reduced inflammatory responses and increased protein production, Karikó and Weissman had eliminated critical obstacles on the way to clinical applications of mRNA.

mRNA vaccines realized their potential

Interest in mRNA technology began to pick up, and in 2010, several companies were working on developing the method. Vaccines against Zika virus and MERS-CoV were pursued; the latter is closely related to SARS-CoV-2. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, two base-modified mRNA vaccines encoding the SARS-CoV-2 surface protein were developed at record speed. Protective effects of around 95% were reported, and both vaccines were approved as early as December 2020.

The impressive flexibility and speed with which mRNA vaccines can be developed pave the way for using the new platform also for vaccines against other infectious diseases. In the future, the technology may also be used to deliver therapeutic proteins and treat some cancer types.

Several other vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, based on different methodologies, were also rapidly introduced, and together, more than 13 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been given globally. The vaccines have saved millions of lives and prevented severe disease in many more, allowing societies to open and return to normal conditions. Through their fundamental discoveries of the importance of base modifications in mRNA, this year's Nobel laureates critically contributed to this transformative development during one of the biggest health crises of our time.

Key publications

Karikó, K., Buckstein, M., Ni, H. and Weissman, D. Suppression of RNA Recognition by Toll-like Receptors: The impact of nucleoside modification and the evolutionary origin of RNA. Immunity 23, 165-175 (2005).

Karikó, K., Muramatsu, H., Welsh, F.A., Ludwig, J., Kato, H., Akira, S. and Weissman, D. Incorporation of pseudouridine into mRNA yields superior nonimmunogenic vector with increased translational capacity and biological stability. Mol Ther 16, 1833-1840 (2008).

Anderson, B.R., Muramatsu, H., Nallagatla, S.R., Bevilacqua, P.C., Sansing, L.H., Weissman, D. and Karikó, K. Incorporation of pseudouridine into mRNA enhances translation by diminishing PKR activation. Nucleic Acids Res. 38, 5884-5892 (2010).

Read more about this year's prize
Scientific background: Discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19
Katalin Karikó was born in 1955 in Szolnok, Hungary. She received her PhD from Szeged's University in 1982 and performed postdoctoral research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged until 1985. She then conducted postdoctoral research at Temple University, Philadelphia, and the University of Health Science, Bethesda. In 1989, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she remained until 2013. After that, she became vice president and later senior vice president at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals. Since 2021, she has been a Professor at Szeged University and an Adjunct Professor at Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Drew Weissman was born in 1959 in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA. He received his MD, PhD degrees from Boston University in 1987. He did his clinical training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School and postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health. In 1997, Weissman established his research group at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research and Director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations.

Illustrations: © The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine. Illustrator: Mattias Karlén
The Nobel Assembly, consisting of 50 professors at Karolinska Institutet, awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Its Nobel Committee evaluates the nominations. Since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been awarded to scientists who have made the most important discoveries for the benefit of humankind.
Nobel Prize® is the registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation

To cite this section
MLA style: Press release. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Sat. 21 Oct 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/>

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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023

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The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman "for their discoveries concerning base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19"

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Read the profile above to start off your group work. You may conduct further Google searches or consult ChatGPT to better understand your chosen pioneer and the impacts of their innovation. Answer the questions below:

1. What was the innovation developed by these pioneers?

2. What were the impacts of their innovation on humanity?

3. What were some of the challenges these pioneers faced?

4. In your view, what do you think motivated your pioneer to explore this frontier?

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Scientists who discovered the DNA molecule

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Find out how the structure of DNA was discovered by Francis Crick and James Watson, and why the discovery revolutionized science and medicine

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Read the profile above to start off your group work. You may conduct further Google searches or consult ChatGPT to better understand your chosen pioneer and the impacts of their innovation. Answer the questions below:

1. What was the innovation developed by these pioneers?

2. What were the impacts of their innovation on humanity?

3. What were some of the challenges these pioneers faced?

4. In your view, what do you think motivated your pioneer to explore this frontier?

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Planetary defense scientist at NASA, researcher of the DART mission

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Aerospace professor proud to be a ‘pioneer in developing planetary defense strategies’

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Masatoshi Hirabayashi, assistant professor in aerospace engineering, will study the dynamic motion of an asteroid after an intentional collision with a space craft on Sept. 26.

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Read the profile above to start off your group work. You may conduct further Google searches or consult ChatGPT to better understand your chosen pioneer and the impacts of their innovation. Answer the questions below:

1. What was the innovation developed by these pioneers?

2. What were the impacts of their innovation on humanity?

3. What were some of the challenges these pioneers faced?

4. In your view, what do you think motivated your pioneer to explore this frontier?

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Discovered the treatment for syphillis and laid the foundation for modern chemotherapy

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P aul Ehrlich was born on March 14, 1854 at Strehlen, in Upper Silesia*, Germany. He was the son of Ismar Ehrlich and his wife Rosa Weigert, whose nephew was the great bacteriologist Karl Weigert.

Ehrlich was educated at the Gymnasium at Breslau and subsequently at the Universities of Breslau, Strassburg, Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Leipzig. In 1878 he obtained his doctorate of medicine by means of a dissertation on the theory and practice of staining animal tissues. This work was one of the results of his great interest in the aniline dyes discovered by W. H. Perkin in 1853.

In 1878 he was appointed assistant to Professor Frerichs at the Berlin Medical Clinic, who gave him every facility to continue his work with these dyes and the staining of tissues with them. Ehrlich showed that all the dyes used could be classified as being basic, acid or neutral and his work on the staining of granules in blood cells laid the foundations of future work on haematology and the staining of tissues.

In 1882 Ehrlich published his method of staining the tubercle bacillus that Koch had discovered and this method was the basis of the subsequent modifications introduced by Ziehl and Neelson, which are still used today. From it was also derived the Gram method of staining bacteria so much used by modern bacteriologists.

In 1882 Ehrlich became Titular Professor and in 1887 he qualified, as a result of his thesis Das Sauerstoffbedürfnis des Organismus (The need of the organism for oxygen) as a Privatdozent (unpaid lecturer or instructor) in the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Berlin. Later he became an Associate Professor there and Senior House Physician to the Charité Hospital in Berlin.

In 1890 Robert Koch, Director of the newly established Institute for Infectious Diseases, appointed Ehrlich as one of his assistants and Ehrlich then began the immunological studies with which his name will always be associated.

At the end of 1896 an Institute for the control of therapeutic sera was established at Steglitz in Berlin and Ehrlich was appointed its Director. Here he did further important work on immunology, especially on haemolysins. He also showed that the toxin-antitoxin reaction is, as chemical reactions are, accelerated by heat and retarded by cold and that the content of antitoxin in antitoxic sera varied so much for various reasons that it was necessary to establish a standard by which their antitoxin content could be exactly measured. This he accomplished with von Behring 's antidiphtheritic serum and thus made it possible to standardize this serum in units related to a fixed and invariable standard. The methods of doing this that Ehrlich then established formed the basis of all future standardization of sera. This work and his other immunological studies led Ehrlich to formulate his famous side-chain theory of immunity.

In 1897 Ehrlich was appointed Public Health Officer at Frankfurt-am-Main and when, in 1899, the Royal Institute of Experimental Therapy was established at Frankfurt, Ehrlich became its Director. He also became Director of the Georg Speyerhaus, which was founded by Frau Franziska Speyer and was built next-door to Ehrlich's Institute. These appointments marked the beginning of the third phase of Ehrlich's many and varied researches. He now devoted himself to chemotherapy, basing his work on the idea, which had been implicit in his doctorate thesis written when he was a young man, that the chemical constitution of drugs used must be studied in relation to their mode of action and their affinity for the cells of the organisms against which they were directed. His aim was, as he put it, to find chemical substances which have special affinities for pathogenic organisms, to which they would go, as antitoxins go to the toxins to which they are specifically related, and would be, as Ehrlich expressed it, "magic bullets" which would go straight to the organisms at which they were aimed.

To achieve this, Ehrlich tested, with the help of his assistants, hundreds of chemical substances selected from the even larger number of these that he had collected. He studied, among other subjects, the treatment of trypanosomiasis and other protozoal diseases and produced trypan red, which was, as his Japanese assistant Shiga showed, effective against trypanosomes. He also established, with A. Bertheim, the correct structural formula of atoxyl, the efficiency of which against certain experimental trypanosomiases was known. This work opened a way of obtaining numerous new organic compounds with trivalent arsenic which Ehrlich tested.

At this time, the spirochaete that causes syphilis was discovered by Schaudinn and Hoffmann in Berlin, and Ehrlich decided to seek a drug that would be effective especially against this spirochaete. Among the arsenical drugs already tested for other purposes was one, the 606th of the series tested, which had been set aside in 1907 as being ineffective. But when Ehrlich's former colleague Kitasato sent a pupil of his, named Hata, to work at Ehrlich's Institute, Ehrlich, learning that Hata had succeeded in infecting rabbits with syphilis, asked him to test this discarded drug on these rabbits. Hata did so and found that it was very effective.

When hundreds of experiments had repeatedly proved its efficacy against syphilis, Ehrlich announced it under the name "Salvarsan". Subsequently, further work on this subject was done and eventually it turned out that the 914th arsenical substance to which the name "Neosalvarsan" was given, was, although its curative effect was less, more easily manufactured and, being more soluble, became more easily administered. Ehrlich had, like so many other discoverers before him, to battle with much opposition before Salvarsan or Neosalvarsan were accepted for the treatment of human syphilis; but ultimately the practical experience prevailed and Ehrlich became famous as one of the main founders of chemotherapy.

During the later years of his life, Ehrlich was concerned with experimental work on tumours and on his view that sarcoma may develop from carcinoma, also on his theory of athreptic immunity to cancer.

The indefatigable industry shown by Ehrlich throughout his life, his kindness and modesty, his lifelong habit of eating little and smoking incessantly 25 strong cigars a day, a box of which he frequently carried under one arm, his invariable insistence on the repeated proof by many experiments of the results he published, and the veneration and devotion shown to him by all his assistants have been vividly described by his former secretary, Martha Marquardt, whose biography of him has given us a detailed picture of his life in Frankfurt. In Frankfurt the street in which his Institute was situated was named Paul Ehrlichstrasse after him, but later, when the Jewish persecution began, this name was removed because Ehrlich was a Jew. After the Second World War, however, when his birth-place, Strehlen, came under the jurisdiction of the Polish authorities, they renamed it Ehrlichstadt, in honour of its great son.

Ehrlich was an ordinary, foreign, corresponding or honorary member of no less than 81 academies and other learned bodies in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, ltaly, The Netherlands, Norway, Roumania, Russia, Serbia, Sweden, Turkey, the U.S.A. and Venezuela. He held honorary doctorates of the Universities of Chicago, Göttingen, Oxford, Athens and Breslau, and was also honoured by Orders in Germany, Russia, Japan, Spain, Roumania, Serbia, Venezuela, Denmark (Commander Cross of the Danebrog Order), and Norway (Commander Cross of the Royal St. Olaf Order).

In 1887 he received the Tiedemann Prize of the Senckenberg Naturforschende Gesellschaft at Frankfurt/Main, in 1906 the Prize of Honour at the XVth International Congress of Medicine at Lisbon, in 1911 the Liebig Medal of the German Chemical Society, and in 1914 the Cameron Prize of Edinburgh. In 1908 he shared with Metchnikoff the highest scientific distinction, the Nobel Prize.

The Prussian Government elected him Privy Medical Counsel in 1897, promoted him to a higher rank of this Counsel in 1907 and, in 1911, raised him to the highest rank, Real Privy Counsel with the title of Excellency.

Ehrlich married, in 1883, Hedwig Pinkus, who was then aged 19. They had two daughters, Stephanie (Mrs. Ernst Schwerin) and Marianne (Mrs. Edmund Landau).

When the First World War broke out in 1914 he was much distressed by it and at Christmas of that year he had a slight stroke. He recovered quickly from this, but his health which had never, apart from a tuberculous infection in early life which had made it necessary for him to spend two years in Egypt, failed him, now began to decline and when, in 1915, he went to Bad Homburg for a holiday, he had, on August 20 of that year, a second stroke which ended his life.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished inNobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

* Lower Silesia

To cite this section
MLA style: Paul Ehrlich - Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2022. Sat. 8 Jan 2022. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1908/ehrlich/biographical/>

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See them all presented here.

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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1908

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P aul Ehrlich was born on March 14, 1854 at Strehlen, in Upper Silesia*, Germany. He was the son of Ismar Ehrlich and his wife Rosa Weigert, whose nephew was the great bacteriologist Karl Weigert. Ehrlich was educated at the Gymnasium at Breslau and subsequently at the Universities of Breslau, Strassburg, Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Leipzig.

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What does exploring frontiers in Science and Technology look like? Reply to this post with your own answer

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What are some examples of modern science and technology that explores the frontiers? Reply to this post with your examples.