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VACCINE MAKER: A scientific hunch. Then silence. Until the world needed a lifesaving vaccine.

For months, the postcards and letters have flowed in from across the world, slipped under the door of Drew Weissman’s austere fourth-floor office at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

Brisbane, Australia. Lynnwood, Wash. New York City. In looping cursive, strangers write to thank this reticent 62-year-old scientist whose years of painstaking work with a scientific partner, Katalin Kariko, formed the backbone of coronavirus vaccines.

For more than two decades, Weissman and Kariko worked shoulder-to-shoulder at the lab bench to turn messenger RNA, the genetic instruction books that tell cells how to build proteins, into medicine. If DNA is the blueprint of life, messenger RNA is the work order that makes it happen. They were convinced this natural process could be harnessed to revolutionize how vaccines are made and transform how diseases are treated.

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