Reacción a "Reactions: Nobel Prize in Physiology awarded to Karikó and Weissman for their discoveries that led to the development of effective mRNA vaccines against covid-19"

Personally, I am delighted that Katalin Karikó, whom I recently met at the Fundación Jiménez Díaz memorial lecture, was awarded the Nobel Prize. In a way it was the "chronicle of a Nobel foretold" because Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó are the progenitors of the RNA modification that allows the proteins it encodes to be expressed at a high level without the cellular machinery degrading that RNA. 

I would highlight two aspects of this Nobel:

• The first is the prize for perseverance, especially that of Katalin Karikó, who played an essential role in the development of this technology, and who persevered despite the fact that her work was not recognised by the 'official academy'. As she herself told us, in a highly competitive system she did not get research projects because her line of work was not considered a priority. 
• Second, basic research is rewarded, not developers or companies, even though they have played a key role in the development of RNA vaccines against covid-19. The message is that good science should be supported, without demanding that it be translational from the outset, because we do not know how far basic research will go, apparently further away from practical application.

In this case, Weissmann and Karikó's work, academic, impeccable, elegant, focused on a basic research question, has literally saved the lives of millions of people. As José Angel Valente's poem says, We do not know how far, or how long, a word, in this case a research paper, can go.