Katalin Karikó, joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1990s with the dream of creating an mRNA vaccine.
(I described what mRNA vaccines are, how they work, and how obstacles were overcome in a previous blog post.)
Many of these scientists gave up as they encountered those obstacles, but a few persisted and, ultimately, succeeded. For 30 years, a small group of scientists believed that mRNA vaccines would have great advantages over traditional vaccines - if only several obstacles could be overcome. The story of mRNA vaccines, like the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for COVID-19, is very different from the story of penicillin. Breakthroughs due to persistence and resilience in pursuit of a dream We all know how that worked out.įleming’s scientific breakthrough, like some others, occurred not because Fleming had a brilliant idea and exclaimed "Eureka!" Instead, it occurred because he noticed something and said, "That’s odd," and then tried to figure it out. It took another 10 years before other scientists tried to generate large amounts of penicillin to see if it might be able to cure bacterial infections and save lives. When Fleming published a paper about his discovery, few were interested. Because the name of the fungus was Penicillium rubens, he called the substance the fungus was making "penicillin." He surmised that it was making some substance that killed the bacteria. Fleming soon noticed that the growing fungus seemed to be killing the bacteria. Then he noticed something odd: overnight, another kind of microbe, a fungus, had traveled through the air, landed on the laboratory dish, and started to grow and spread on the dish where the bacteria were growing. He was a microbiologist, just doing his job. Fleming was not pursuing a scientific dream. Mary’s Hospital in London was growing bacteria in a laboratory dish. Breakthroughs due to lucky accidents and curiosity But sometimes the road leads to major breakthroughs like penicillin and mRNA vaccines. So, they scramble to find financial support and seek out colleagues willing to risk traveling that road with them - a road that may well lead nowhere. It’s a sobering message, yet the idea won’t die. It’s crazy, they say to themselves, but is it really impossible? They talk to respected colleagues who often remind them of all the reasons their idea might not work, and how damaging this could be for their career. One day, usually early in their career, they get an idea that they can’t stop thinking about. Other major breakthroughs stem from scientists pursuing a very specific dream.
What does it take to achieve world-changing scientific breakthroughs? Some are the result of a lucky accident, combined with curiosity: scientists traveling down one road suddenly find reason to veer onto another road, one they never planned to travel - a road that may well lead nowhere. In science, advances are a daily occurrence, but true breakthroughs are rare.
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