There is a fragile and unstable molecule that is essential for human existence: it is the RNA, responsible for collecting the instructions of life stored in DNA and converting them into the proteins that allow us to breathe, eat, run or read. It is an ephemeral molecule because it disintegrates quickly, but it is useful for almost everything. Even to cure the sick: the vaccines against covid based on messenger RNA technology - it is the body's own cells that produce molecules with therapeutic capacity - have saved thousands of lives and its creators, researchers Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, have just take the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the development of this technique. Its potential, in fact, goes beyond covid and the scientific community is already exploring its possibilities in other diseases, such as cancer, flu, HIV or autoimmune ailments.
