Vaccine Scientists: TIME magazine Heroes of the Year 2021
Only as the virus emerges from the shadows of these favored havens does it confront its most formidable foe: the scientists quietly awaiting it. How they responded was less mysterious, and certainly less unpredictable, than the virus they targeted. Their medium was light, and the brightness of scientific truth, which they painstakingly pursued in brilliantly lit research labs and “clean rooms” scrubbed of airborne particles—and produced brilliant results.
About a month after the first cluster of patients appeared wheezing in a Wuhan hospital, the entire genome of the responsible coronavirus—30,000 specific nucleotides—had been sorted, identified and posted online.
Two weeks later, designs were already being keyed into machines to create a vaccine that would unlock a world that had not even locked down yet.
Given that speed, it was easy to imagine that a solution to the problem of SARS-CoV-2 was inevitable. After all, things we took to be miracles not long ago have become the stuff of everyday life—routine, apparently effortless. A miracle is as close at hand as your average smartphone, which has 100,000 times the computational power as the computer that took humankind to the moon. In 2020, if scientists in China were able to map the genetic structure of a novel virus in a few days, that sounded, well, about right. Later, as countries went into lockdown, we continued to assume progress, to regard vaccines as our due.
Except there was nothing inevitable about them. The vaccines that first arrested the spread of COVID-19—and that will almost surely be adjusted to thwart the Omicron variant and future mutations—were never a foregone conclusion. Far from it. They were, after all, produced by human beings, subject to the vagaries of systems and doubt. There were times in their careers when, deep in the work that would ultimately rescue humanity, Kizzmekia Corbett, Barney Graham, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman felt as though the problems they faced were ones they alone cared about solving. But exposing the inner workings of how viruses survive and thrive is what made the COVID-19 vaccines possible.
The four were hardly alone in those efforts: scientists around the world have produced COVID-19 vaccines using a variety of platforms and technologies. Many—like the shots from Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson–Janssen—came from more established methods, modified with impressive speed to fight a new virus. Still, Corbett, Graham, Kariko and Weissman achieved a breakthrough of singular importance, introducing an innovative and highly effective vaccine platform, based on mRNA, that will impact our health and well-being far beyond this pandemic.
Progress flows from the gradual accretion of knowledge. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, it started with the initially painstaking process of decoding the genomes of all living things; then folded in the development of sequencing machines that reduced that genetic reading time to hours; and finally weaved in the insights—“Put it in a fat bubble!”—that seemed to come in brilliant flashes but were actually the result of wisdom developed over decades working on how to manipulate a finicky genetic material called mRNA. What drives it all might, in less divisive times, seem too obvious to mention: fealty to facts. It’s the basis of the scientific method and the structure of our world. Without trust in objective reality, the lights don’t turn on, the computer doesn’t boot up, the streets stay empty.
“We have turned a disease that has been a once-in-a-generation fatal pandemic, that has claimed more than 780,000 lives in America, into what is for the most part a vaccine-preventable disease,” says Dr. Leana Wen, professor of health policy and management at George Washington University. “That is the difference that the vaccine has made.”
For those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy countries with access to these top-shelf vaccines, it has made all the difference. The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another and trusted in facts.
