Drew Weissman

Origins and early life

Drew Weissman was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, on 7 September 1959, the son of Hal Weissman, an engineer, and of Adele, and grew up there, finishing Lexington High School in 1977. His father is Jewish and his mother, who is Italian, did not convert, but he grew up celebrating all the Jewish holidays, kept them with his wife Mary Ellen and sent their children to Hebrew school at a Conservative synagogue, though he says the family is not religious and calls himself more of a Daoist.

He meant to be an engineer like his father until biology at school changed his mind, took his bachelor's and master's degrees at Brandeis University in 1981 and a medical degree and doctorate at Boston University in 1987.

Work and career

After a residency at Beth Israel Deaconess and a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health under Anthony Fauci, he moved in 1997 to the University of Pennsylvania, where at a photocopier he met the Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó, who had long struggled to fund her mRNA research. He was studying dendritic cells, and together they found that these cells take laboratory-made mRNA for an intruder and release inflammatory signals, while mRNA from mammalian cells, whose bases are often chemically modified, does not.

In 2005 they showed that adding such modified bases almost abolished the inflammation, and in 2008 and 2010 that it also raised the production of the desired protein.

Recognition

Two vaccines against COVID-19 built on modified mRNA were approved in December 2020, giving about 95 per cent protection, and in 2021 the two scientists shared the Lasker clinical research award. In 2023 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, and the first call he made was to his parents, Hal, ninety-one, and Adele, ninety.