Bravo Zulu - Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna
Fully agree re be nice to the helpful people in retail and services. Adding medical reception, + as the multiple unreasonable demands and expectations for my staff and Doctors to do things may well be a book one day[biggrin]
on the Vaccine front a huge cheer to the two Women who are quietly heralded heroes. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna "for the development of a method for genome editing"
AKA know as CRISPR, It allows scientists to precisely cut any strand of DNA they wish. Sounds high level but at a base level it has enabled already "New test detects coronavirus in just 5 minutes | Science | AAAS"
This has been used by all phama developing Covid 19 vaccines as it and multiplex test enables scienctist to do in minutes what previously took years.
https://acs-h.assetsadobe.com/is/ima...resMode=sharp2
Every place rabbiting on about how fast they are seems to be forgetting to thank and credit these two Superstars.
Developing a vaccine that appears safe and effective in a matter of months, rather than the years or decades that such developments usually take
This month, two very different companies — the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and the biotech upstart Moderna — reported spectacular results from high-stakes clinical trials of their experimental coronavirus vaccines. It was a remarkable feat: developing a vaccine that appears safe and effective in a matter of months, rather than the years or decades that such developments usually take.
A team of Times reporters — Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Thomas, Noah Weiland, David Gelles, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Denise Grady — tracked how the extraordinary race unfolded, with so much at stake and such a complex backdrop. At play were not just commercial rivalries and scientific challenges but an ambitious plan to put the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed — and an often toxic political atmosphere created by President Trump — in the middle of the effort.
Pfizer’s chief executive, Dr. Albert Bourla, had vowed to avoid the political minefield but was forced to maneuver through it nonetheless. After promising a timetable that seemed to support Mr. Trump’s prediction of a breakthrough before Election Day, Dr. Bourla pushed back the schedule in late October, fearing his firm’s clinical trial results would otherwise not be convincing enough for federal regulators to grant emergency approval of its vaccine.
Dr. Bourla had chosen from the start to keep Pfizer and its research partner, the German firm BioNTech, at arms length from the government, declining research and development money from Operation Warp Speed.
But Pfizer’s main rival, Moderna, made the opposite bet, embracing the assistance of a government led by a science-denying president. Moderna got nearly $2.5 billion to develop, manufacture and sell its vaccine to the federal government and teamed up with the National Institutes of Health on the scientific work, a highly successful partnership that managed to sidestep the political meddling by Mr. Trump and his aides that had bedeviled other efforts to confront the virus.
Both companies were aided by a confluence of three factors. A new method of developing vaccines was already waiting to be tested, with the coronavirus a perfect target. Sky-high infection rates accelerated the pace of clinical trials, the most time-consuming part of the process. And the government was willing to spend whatever it took, eliminating financial risks and bureaucratic roadblocks and allowing mass production to begin even before the trials were done.
Their apparent success showed that in an era of polarized politics, science was able to break down barriers between government, countries and industry to produce one of the few pieces of good news in a year of suffering and division.
