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In
our top read this week, BBC Future's Tim
Smedley discovers that the pandemic's mRNA vaccines
may be the key to solving a wealth of health
problems.
Barely a year ago, Anna
Blakney was working in a relatively inconspicuous,
niche field of science in a lab in London. Few
people outside of her scientific circles had heard
of mRNA vaccines. Because none yet existed.
Attendees at an annual conference talk she gave in
2019 could be counted in the tens, not hundreds.
Today, she's in hot demand: an assistant professor
at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and
a science communicator with 253,000 followers and
3.7 million likes on TikTok. She was, she admits,
in the right place at the right time to ride a
once-in-a-generation wave of scientific progress.
She even gave this new era a name: "the
RNAissance".
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic,
many people have now heard of – and have received
– an mRNA vaccine, from the likes of
Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. But even when Blakney
started her PhD at Imperial College London in
2016, "a lot of people were sceptical as to
whether it could ever work". Now, "the whole field
of mRNA is just exploding. It's a game changer in
medicine," she says.
It's such a game
changer that it raises some very big, exciting
questions: could mRNA vaccines provide a cure for
cancers, HIV, tropical diseases, and even give us
superhuman immunity? | |
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