Lena Horne, New York, Sept. 30-1954. Vivian Maier.
I’ll go my way by myself, this is the end of romance.
I’ll go my way by myself, love is only a dance.
I’ll try to apply myself and teach my heart to sing.
I’ll go my way by myself like a bird on the wing,
as sung by Lena Horne, written by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz.
Ethel Waters (October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977) was an American singer and actress. Waters frequently performed jazz, swing, and pop music on the Broadway stage and in concerts, but she began her career in the 1920s singing blues.
Ida Lupino, pictured here on the set of THE HITCH-HIKER, was born on this day in 1918. What is your favorite film of hers, noir or not, in front of the camera or behind it?
Covid-19 vaccines are starting to roll out in several countries, a momentous breakthrough that hopefully signals a light at the end of this dark pandemic. For Katalin Karikó, the moment is particularly special.
Karikó has spent decades of her career researching the therapeutic possibilities of mRNA, a component of DNA that is considered to be one of the main building blocks of life. Through multiple setbacks, job losses, doubt and a transatlantic move, Karikó stood by her conviction: That mRNA could be used for something truly groundbreaking. Now, that work is the basis of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Karikó, 65, began her career in her native Hungary in the 1970s, when mRNA research was new and the possibilities seemed endless. But the call of the American dream (and more researching and funding opportunities) took root.
In 1985, she and her husband and young daughter left Hungary for the US after she got an invitation from Temple University in Philadelphia. They sold their car, Karikó told The Guardian, and stuffed the money – an equivalent of about $1,200 – in their daughter’s teddy bear for safekeeping…
She continued her research at Temple, and then at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. But by then, the bloom was off the rose of mRNA research, and Karikó’s idea that it could be used to fight disease was deemed too radical, too financially risky to fund. She applied for grant after grant, but kept getting rejections, and in 1995, she was demoted from her position at UPenn. She also was diagnosed with cancer around the same time.
“Usually, at that point, people just say goodbye and leave because it’s so horrible,” she told Stat, a health news site, in November. “I thought of going somewhere else, or doing something else. I also thought maybe I’m not good enough, not smart enough.”
But she stuck with it.
Eventually, Karikó and her former colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Drew Weissman, developed a method of utilizing synthetic mRNA to fight disease that involves changing the way the body produces virus-fighting material, she explained on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time.”
That discovery is now the basis of the Covid-19 vaccine, and some have said both Weissman and Karikó, now a senior vice president of the Germany-based BioNTech, deserve a Nobel Prize.
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