The foundation of the COVID-19 vaccine, and many others, can be drawn back to the work of an intrepid immigrant to the United States from Hungary, whose never-say-die attitude and belief in her work led to one of the most important technological developments in vaccine research.

Katalin Karikó is now being talked about for a Nobel Prize, but life wasn’t always so congratulatory for her, and the story about how she practically invented mRNA and RNA-derived therapies and vaccines—the basis of so many lifesaving treatments—was filled with challenges.

When Karikó left her native Hungary with husband and young child, she had just $1,200 stuffed in her daughter’s teddy bear. Now, after years of her work developing mRNA and RNA technologies, she is the senior vice-president for the German pharmaceutical giant BioNTech, and her work has received more than 12,000 academic citations.

After graduating with a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Szeged, she afterwards embarked on a research career at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

However, after getting laid off, Karikó subsequently relocated to the United States after receiving an invitation from Temple University in Philadelphia in 1985. She would eventually transfer to University of Pennsylvania, which would end up being an extremely difficult period.

In that time, messenger RNA research was extremely popular, but shortly after she arrived, the method for using a virus’s genetic material to command a human body to duplicate certain proteins to fight the virus was considered too radical, and too financially risky to fund.

The failed grant applications began piling up on Karikó’s desk, but she was not deterred.

Ten years after she arrived in Philadelphia, she was demoted from her position at UPenn and was then diagnosed with cancer...

Week beginning on February 28, 2021: 417.97 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 414.07 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 392.12 ppm

Months after the 2020 election, the United States feels more divided than ever. Today’s youth have only ever experienced a fractured America, rife with ideological polarization that corrodes our ability to listen to and understand voices different from our own. Such division not only threatens democracy and political stability, but also our ability to help those in this country who need it most.

“Speak Now,” a three-part series from the Cornell Advocacy Project, is addressing this divide, exploring the role of empathy in rehabilitating hostile spaces. Through the insight of an experienced advocate, each webinar will equip attendees with rhetorical techniques and productive strategies for engaging in political discourse, advocacy, and activism in this increasingly polarized age.

In the second episode of this series, “Law and Disorder,” Cornell Law School Professor Michael Dorf will explore the role of the Constitution and judicial system in contributing to — and fighting — modern American polarization.

This event is hosted by the Cornell Advocacy Project and co-sponsored by Cornell Law School.

In 2004, Heather Hoff was working at a clothing store and living with her husband in San Luis Obispo, a small, laid-back city in the Central Coast region of California. A few years earlier, she had earned a B.S. in materials engineering from the nearby California Polytechnic State University. But she’d so far found work only in a series of eclectic entry-level positions—shovelling grapes at a winery, assembling rectal thermometers for cows. She was twenty-four years old and eager to start a career.

One of the county’s major employers was the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, situated on the coastline outside the city. Jobs there were stable and well-paying. But Diablo Canyon is a nuclear facility—it consists of two reactors, each contained inside a giant concrete dome—and Hoff, like many people, was suspicious of nuclear power. Her mother had been pregnant with her in March, 1979, when the meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania, transfixed the nation. Hoff grew up in Arizona, in an unconventional family that lived in a trailer with a composting toilet. She considered herself an environmentalist, and took it for granted that environmentalism and nuclear power were at odds.

Nonetheless, Hoff decided to give Diablo Canyon a try. She was hired as a plant operator. The work took her on daily rounds of the facility, checking equipment performance—oil flows, temperatures, vibrations—and hunting for signs of malfunction. Still skeptical, she asked constant questions about the safety of the technology. “When four-thirty on Friday came, my co-workers were, like, ‘Shut up, Heather, we want to go home,’ ” she recalled. “When I finally asked enough questions to understand the details, it wasn’t that scary.”

In the course of years, Hoff grew increasingly comfortable at the plant. She switched roles, working in the control room and then as a procedure writer, and got to know the workforce—mostly older, avuncular men. She began to believe that nuclear power was a safe, potent source of clean energy with numerous advantages over other sources. For instance, nuclear reactors generate huge amounts of energy on a small footprint: Diablo Canyon, which accounts for roughly nine per cent of the electricity produced in California, occupies fewer than six hundred acres. It can generate energy at all hours and, unlike solar and wind power, does not depend on particular weather conditions to operate. Hoff was especially struck by the fact that nuclear-power generation does not emit carbon dioxide or the other air pollutants associated with fossil fuels. Eventually, she began to think that fears of nuclear energy were not just misguided but dangerous. Her job no longer seemed to be in tension with her environmentalist views. Instead, it felt like an expression of her deepest values...

...By 1979, the U.S. had seventy-two commercial reactors. That year proved pivotal in the shaping of public opinion toward nuclear power in America. On March 16th, “The China Syndrome,” starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas, was released; the film portrayed corruption and a meltdown at a fictional nuclear plant. Twelve days later, one of the two reactors at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in southeastern Pennsylvania partially melted down. Most epidemiological studies would eventually determine that the accident had no detectable health consequences. But at the time there was no way the public could know this, and the incident added momentum to the anti-nuclear movement. By the time of the Chernobyl catastrophe, in Soviet Ukraine, in 1986—widely considered to be the worst nuclear disaster in history—opposition to nuclear power was widespread...

...Pro-nuclear environmentalists often tell a conversion story, describing the moment when they began to see nuclear power not as something that could destroy the world but as something that could save it. They argue that much of what we think we know about nuclear energy is wrong. Instead of being the most dangerous energy source, it is one of the safest, linked with far fewer deaths per terawatt-hour than all fossil fuels. We perceive nuclear waste as uniquely hazardous, but, while waste from oil, natural gas, and coal is spewed into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases and as other forms of pollution, spent nuclear-fuel rods, which are solid, are contained in concrete casks or cooling pools, where they are monitored and prevented from causing harm...

Bio:
Tracy Drain is a Flight Systems Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In her 20
years at the lab, she has helped develop and operate the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (a
Mars science/relay orbiter), Kepler (an Exoplanet hunting mission), Juno (a Jupiter orbiter)
and Psyche (an asteroid explorer slated to launch in 2022). She is currently the Lead Flight
Systems Engineer on the Europa Clipper mission, slated to launch in 2024 to explore one
of the most intriguing moons of Jupiter. A life-long learner, she loves to encourage people
of all ages nurture their curiosity and explore the wonders, near and far, that surround us
every day.

Abstract:
Tune in to learn about Juno – a spacecraft sent across the solar system to study our largest
planetary neighbor! Tracy Drain, a Flight Systems Engineer at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, will share some stories from Juno’s development, its journey through space and
the initial amazing science discoveries at Jupiter.