Posted on 09/21/2021 12:50:46 PM PDT by Pelham
In late 1987, Robert Malone performed a landmark experiment. He mixed strands of messenger RNA with droplets of fat, to create a kind of molecular stew. Human cells bathed in this genetic gumbo absorbed the mRNA, and began producing proteins from it1.
Realizing that this discovery might have far-reaching potential in medicine, Malone, a grad student at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, later jotted down some notes, which he signed and dated. If cells could create proteins from mRNA delivered into them, he wrote on 11 January 1988, it might be possible to “treat RNA as a drug”. Another member of the Salk lab signed the notes, too, for posterity. Later that year, Malone’s experiments showed that frog embryos absorbed such mRNA2. It was the first time anyone had used fatty droplets to ease mRNA’s passage into a living organism.
Those experiments were a stepping stone towards two of the most important and profitable vaccines in history: the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines given to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
But the path to success was not direct. For many years after Malone’s experiments, which themselves had drawn on the work of other researchers, mRNA was seen as too unstable and expensive to be used as a drug or a vaccine. Dozens of academic labs and companies worked on the idea, struggling with finding the right formula of fats and nucleic acids — the building blocks of mRNA vaccines.
Today’s mRNA jabs have innovations that were invented years after Malone’s time in the lab, including chemically modified RNA and different types of fat bubble to ferry them into cells. Still, Malone, who calls himself the “inventor of mRNA vaccines”, thinks his work hasn’t been given enough credit. “I’ve been written out of history,” he told Nature.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Nobel debate As for who deserves a Nobel, the names that come up most often in conversation are Karikó and Weissman. The two have already won several prizes, including one of the Breakthrough Prizes (at $3 million, the most lucrative award in science) and Spain’s prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research. Also recognized in the Asturias prize were Felgner, Şahin, Türeci and Rossi, along with Sarah Gilbert, the vaccinologist behind the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, UK, and the drug firm AstraZeneca, which uses a viral vector instead of mRNA. (Cullis’s only recent accolade was a $5,000 founder’s award from the Controlled Release Society, a professional organization of scientists who study time-release drugs.)
Some also argue that Karikó should be acknowledged as much for her contributions to the mRNA research community at large as for her discoveries in the lab. “She’s not only an incredible scientist, she’s just a force in the field,” says Anna Blakney, an RNA bioengineer at the University of British Columbia. Blakney gives Karikó credit for offering her a speaking slot at a major conference two years ago, when she was still in a junior postdoc position (and before Blakney co-founded VaxEquity, a vaccine company in Cambridge, UK, focusing on self-amplifying-RNA technology). Karikó “is actively trying to lift other people up in a time when she’s been so under-recognized her whole career”.
Although some involved in mRNA’s development, including Malone, think they deserve more recognition, others are more willing to share the limelight. “You really can’t claim credit,” says Cullis. When it comes to his lipid delivery system, for instance, “we’re talking hundreds, probably thousands of people who have been working together to make these LNP systems so that they’re actually ready for prime time.”
“Everyone just incrementally added something — including me,” says Karikó.
Looking back, many say they’re just delighted that mRNA vaccines are making a difference to humanity, and that they might have made a valuable contribution along the road. “It’s thrilling for me to see this,” says Felgner. “All of the things that we were thinking would happen back then — it’s happening now.”
Nature 597, 318-324 (2021)
Don’t tell anyone but they’re not Vaccines
Thanks.
I’ve been meaning to look for and read something on history of this technology.
If there’s one person who has to be recognized it’s Katalin Karikó. She was just too stubborn to quit, when most people would have just found another line of research.
Malone has seemed kind of bitter these past few months, but it wasn’t clear why, until reading this.
Thanks for posting this.
bkmk
****
lol. how things in the “scientific” establishment never seem to change.
always minimize the leap of insight present in the individual discoverer and maximize the plodding failures of scientific consensus—i.e., the bureaucratic crowd of pompous, credit seeking, vapid followers.
So mRNA technology was available but had no marketable use unless the right virus was rampant? Did Fauci/NIH fund Wu Han to develop a virus that the Moderna etc. mRNA “vaccine” would kill? “Follow the money” is always a good way to answer questions where so much money is involved. Are people in government and media getting a kickback for essentially advertising and even mandating people to get the jab?
Some here on the daily vaccination thread think Robert Malone is a dunce. I think that says more about them then Robert Malone.
Malone doesn’t seem bitter to me. I follow him on twitter, he seems pretty objective and pragmatic. Actually amazing since there are those who are desperately trying to cancel him.
No death serum.
Ok, o ye wearing Johnny Carson turban, what are they?
“Bitter” may not be exactly the right word, but he’s seemed a little off since he appeared on Brett Weinstein’s podcast. It’s not that he was holding himself out as the original thinker behind the mRNA concept, more that he never corrects anyone who introduces him as the ‘inventor’ of the mRNA vaccines.
That’s just too big a stretch. He was well known as one of the early researchers, but there were so many other people involved, over a long period of time, it just always struck me as a little odd.
“If there’s one person who has to be recognized it’s Katalin Karikó”
She seems to be held in very high regard by her contemporaries. They are the ones recommending her for a Nobel prize. The public doesn’t know her name because she’s not a self-promoter looking for recognition.
You could submit a paper explaining that. PubMed has instructions.
“more that he never corrects anyone who introduces him as the ‘inventor’ of the mRNA vaccines.”
He claims that honor in his Twitter “bio” under his picture.
Robert W Malone, MD
@RWMaloneMD
Inventor of mRNA vaccines and RNA as a drug, Bench to Bedside vaccines and biologics consulting.
No death serum.
———- Our military scientists messed with MRNA for years, about 15, and dropped it as being to dangerous. England also, but North Korea is still researching it for “ targeted” bio warfare.
“Our military scientists messed with MRNA for years, about 15, and dropped it as being to dangerous”
What’s the source for that?
I called it thankless gain and blodless blame.
Everybody gets a trophy / shares the credit for the positives and nobody is held accountable for the failures.
Yea team!
Sounds a lot like socialism.
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