Science 📍

But these fastest vaccines in history have been decades in the making. They’re the product of generations of scientists who built on one idea after another, and kept at it despite failed experiments, rejections, threats of deportation, a lack of funding and skepticism from contemporaries. They were inspired by the discovery of DNA: in 1951, a young English physical chemist named Rosalind Franklin took X-ray photographs that captured DNA’s helical shape; two years later, James Watson and Francis Crick of Cambridge University published the first report describing DNA’s double helix, for which they received the Nobel Prize. (Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958; her contributions were largely overlooked in her lifetime.) And they were driven not by a race to halt a raging pathogen or by the chance to patent a multi-billion-dollar drug, but by one big, irresistible question: What makes life?