A lucid, fascinating, often funny, and enlightening piece about one of the vaccines by Bert Hubert. He not only details the vaccine itself, down to the specific sequences of RNA, but how mRNA vaccines in general work. It’s a wonderfully nerdy yet approachable read. Did you know there’s such a thing as a DNA printer¹?

Seeing this breakdown of the individual sequences, how bits get swapped in to make the vaccine undetectable or more effective at producing the spike protein in isolation, is just fascinating. The science of DNA and genome sequencing have been reality for most of my life — I can still remember what a big deal The Human Genome Project was, both when it was announced and completed — but they’ve always felt very abstract or the realm of science fiction. Seeing the diagrams with nucleotides feels like Jurassic Park, this is about as real as it gets, though.

It’s also fascinating how many of the citations and links are to what are essentially open source biology. Obviously, Covid is a unique challenge in human history and it is an indisputably amazing thing that so many scientists are working together so diligently to understand and defeat it. It’s also pretty amazing that anyone can just go to the WHO website and download the genetic sequence for the vaccine.