Penn RNA pioneers Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman are among Franklin Institute award winners

Two decades ago, two scientists from the University of Pennsylvania launched a series of experiments that would pave the way for the first COVID-19 vaccines. Over the past year, manufacturers have brought this research to life, producing enough doses to prevent millions of deaths and hospitalizations.

Yet almost two years after the first reports of infection with a new coronavirus, many people still underestimate its risk, rejecting vaccines, masks and other measures that could bring the pandemic under control.

The Franklin Institute acknowledged all of these elements of the fight to contain COVID on Tuesday, announcing the annual winners of its science and business leadership awards.

The 13 winners include Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, the highly decorated Penn duo whose work with messenger RNA forms the basis of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Also on the list are the CEOs of these two companies, as well as the CEO of a third vaccine maker, Johnson & Johnson.

Then there’s University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic, who has spent his career studying a phenomenon that seems particularly relevant during the pandemic: psychic numbness. He argues that this mindset, along with other cognitive biases, has distorted our perception of risk, and he outlined strategies to get us back on track.

The winners share a total of nine prizes, which will be presented at the Franklin Institute’s traditional black tie ceremony on May 5. The Science Museum has awarded prizes to scientists and inventors since the 1820s, including Marie and Pierre Curie, Orville Wright, Thomas Edison, Jane Goodall and Stephen Hawking.

Larry Dubinski, president and CEO of the institute, said the new awardees are being recognized at a time when scientific rigor is more important than ever.

“These achievements come at a critical time for all of us,” he said. “If there’s anything the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, it’s that science matters. “

The winners are:

Bower Award for Scientific Achievement, Paul Slovic, University of Oregon and Decision Sciences Research Institute. The psychologist has found that during the pandemic, people have responded to public health advice just as they are responding to another large-scale threat that defies quick fixes: climate change. Writing with Wharton School researcher Howard Kunreuther, he says that in both cases, too many of us are “nearsighted, not seeing the point in taking immediate action to reduce the severe foreseen future consequences.” A better message is needed to convey the potential consequences for individuals, coupled with well-designed policies and incentives to guide behaviors that protect the community as a whole, they say.

Bower Award for Corporate Leadership, Stéphane Bancel, Managing Director of Moderna; Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer; and Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson. In January 2020, a few weeks after the news of a new respiratory disease in China, the three drug makers began to design and test vaccines. Even before the first results of large-scale studies appear later in the year, businesses aligned production facilities and have now supplied the world with billions of doses. But with vaccination rates remaining low in developing countries, regulators are under increasing pressure to waive company patents – potentially allowing others to manufacture the vaccines as well.

NextGen Price: Kafui Dzirasa, Duke University Medical Center. Psychiatrist and engineer, Dzirasa studies how electrical signals in the brain contribute to mental health disorders. By working with lab mice, he and his colleagues created “an electrical map of depression in the brain” – hoping to use it as a predictive tool, much like blood pressure monitors can be used to assess blood pressure. risk of heart attack or heart attack. stroke. They also used electrodes to target circuitry in the brain of mice, “component” an animal’s mood from top to bottom.

The awards also include Franklin medals in the following disciplines:

Biomedical genius: Sheldon Weinbaum, City College of New York. Weinbaum studies the physics of the human body: how bones respond to mechanical forces, what causes plaque to rupture in diseased arteries, and how heat is transferred between blood vessels and surrounding tissue. He is also a longtime advocate for women and people of color in science and engineering. In the 1990s, he was the lead plaintiff and organizer of a class action lawsuit that accused New York state officials of discriminatory funding at his universities.

Chemistry: Carol V. Robinson, University of Oxford. The chemist is a pioneer in the use of mass spectrometry to decipher the three-dimensional architecture of protein complexes. She was the first female professor in her field at the University of Cambridge and then crossed the same barrier at Oxford. In 2013, she was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Earth and environmental sciences: Sallie W. Chisholm, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joint professor of engineering and biology, she is best known for his discovery of the bacteria in 1988 which produce more than half of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. Chisholm then studied the genetic code of the organism, its impact on ocean ecosystems and its response to climate change.

Electrical engineering: Russell D. Dupuis, Georgia Institute of Technology, and P. Daniel Dapkus, University of Southern California. The pair are recognized for the development of a technique called chemical organic metal vapor deposition, which is widely used in the production of LEDs for flat screen TVs, solar panels and other electronic devices.

Life sciences: Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, University of Pennsylvania. Between them, the duo won more than a dozen awards since developing COVID vaccines based on their work with RNA. But when they started collaborating in the late 1990s, RNA research was widely seen as a dead end. Through a process of trial and error, the two scientists learned how to modify genetic molecules so that they can be used to provide instructions for the production of proteins. Karikó is now at BioNTech SE, the German company that partnered with Pfizer to produce the first vaccine authorized in the United States. The RNA platform is also being explored to provide treatments for cancer and heart disease.

Physics: Edward C. Stone, California Institute of Technology. A physics teacher, Stone is best known for overseeing NASA’s Voyager project, which consisted of two spaceships that transformed scientists’ understanding of the solar system. Among other discoveries, the program captured the first images of rings that surround Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Team members also found that Neptune radiates more than twice as much energy as it receives from the sun, a phenomenon that remains poorly understood.