IN PHOTOS Northern lights dance across the night sky in southern Ont.
From London, to Mildmay, Collingwood and St. Thomas, here are some highlights of Friday night and Saturday morning's northern lights display.
Scientists generally don't seek the limelight, but Dr. Katalin Kariko has been thrust right into it. The once obscure biochemist is now on the covers of magazines and newspapers because of her role in developing mRNA vaccine technology.
An idea she started working on in the 1990s when no one thought it would work.
“They said: ‘Oh, poor Kati,’” Kariko told CTV News. “Because people just knew about [how] the RNA degrades, but I could make RNA and it didn't degrade.”
She grew up daughter to a butcher, in a poor town near Budapest, where she lived in one room with her family for the first 10 years of her life. During this time, she also learned the skills for success there: determination, hard work and a positive attitude.
“We learned from our parents that hard work is part of life,” she said.
Now, she is a senior vice president at BioNtech, the German company that worked with Pfizer to develop one of the vaccines credited with saving lives across the world during this pandemic.
But it took many years of toiling on research others put little stock into before her work bore fruition.
“I was working in the shadow of the gene therapy and people who work with DNA,” she said.
Even though progress on her work was incremental at times, she knew that that progress was still happening.
“That kept me going and I could see that it would be good for something,” she said. “That's what was driving me.”
After earning a PhD in biology, she put in long hours, not for fame or fortune, but because the science was fun for her.
“To be a scientist is a joy,” Kariko said. “I didn't care that my salary was less. That was enough. I didn't starve and so it was good.
“If somebody wants to have a lot of money, [they] shouldn’t be scientists, but if somebody wants to have the joy and fun, everyday life, [they] should be a scientist.”
She worked in Europe and then the U.S. as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, but was denied funding for her own research. Several times, she was demoted or fired.
However, she holds no grudges.
“You will see, every picture I'm smiling, I was happy,” she said, adding that she learned to see every setback or lost job as a new opportunity.
That optimistic outlook kept her going.
“I listened to the constructive criticism because I like to get the advice, but when it was just not that constructive, that I ignored,” she said.
Stress she saw as a motivator, citing the work of Hans Selye, who coined the term.
“He said that you need stress,” Kariko said. “Believe it or not, you need stress because you were not getting up in the morning. The positive stress which encouraged you, that you are [going to] look forward to the day, because you will learn today the result of that experiment, […] so that kind of stimulation you need.”
Then, in 2013, she moved to Germany to work with a little known company -- BioNtech -- to work on an mRNA flu shot technology that quickly pivoted to produce a COVID-19 vaccine when the pandemic struck.
“If I wouldn't have been fired three, four times for my job, I wouldn't be here,” she said. “I had to even thank people, everybody who made my life miserable, because [without them] I wouldn't be here actually.”
Kariko says she is thankful to have been part of the large number of scientists who contributed to create these vaccines, which have shown clear signs of protecting against severe COVID-19.
“I always felt so much respect for all of these people who did work before us,” she said. “I respect all of those people, and I thank them today.”
The work of other scientists in the field and related fields allowed Kariko and a close collaborator, Dr. Drew Weissman, to take their mRNA technology beyond the petri dish and make it start to work in living models. The big step forward was when they swapped a key molecule in their mRNA, which protected it from a body’s immune system.
The concept of being in the spotlight is new to Kariko, who had always been happiest at a lab bench, working away.
“But getting in the spotlight, I also realized that we as scientists did not talk to the public,” she said. “We like to talk to each other because we understand each other easy and we use terms that the average person would not understand.”
She said scientists had to “learn that language,” to try and explain the work to the average person. That barrier of communication is one of the reasons that Kariko is angered by anti-vaxxers who seek to scare people away from getting the vaccine.
She pointed out that unlike scientists, they do not have to worry about communicating accurately and truthfully.
“I watched those anti vaxxers […] they are so calm and they are so confident and they are saying [such] stupid things with [such] conviction,” she said. “And what they say is so trivial. And then everybody will say: ‘Yeah, he is right. Yeah.’ So that's not good.”
She pointed out that big voices in the anti-vaccine world are often motivated by money.
“People always want to make money on other people who believe things, and listen, that's what happened here, in the United States, those doctors who are saying that, do not take the vaccine, they offer you something they sell.
“And so that's horrible because there are innocent people [who] listen, and then they pay the price. So I learned that as a scientist, we have to educate the public.”
The scientist now rarely turns down interview requests.
She’s won more than three dozen awards this year alone, all while becoming a new grandmother and helping to chase treatments for cancer, MS, Lupus and malaria, using the same mRNA technology that might have never come to fruition were it not for an incredibly determined scientist.
From London, to Mildmay, Collingwood and St. Thomas, here are some highlights of Friday night and Saturday morning's northern lights display.
For decades, North Bay, Ontario's water supply has harboured chemicals associated with liver and developmental issues, cancer and complications with pregnancy. It's far from the only city with that problem.
The Netherlands' contestant in the Eurovision Song Contest was dramatically expelled from competition hours before Saturday's final of the pan-continental pop competition, which has been rattled by protests over the participation of Israel.
The rolling hills leading to the hamlet of Rosebud are dotted with sprawling farms and cattle pastures -- and a sign sporting a simple message: No Race Track.
An evacuation alert was issued for two Wood Buffalo communities Friday night, as crews battled an out-of-control wildfire near Fort McMurray.
Evan Bouchard scored 5:38 into overtime and the Edmonton Oilers bounced back for a 4-3 win over the Vancouver Canucks in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs on Friday.
Where you live plays a big factor in what you pay at the grocery store. And while it's no secret the same item may have a different price depending on the store, city or province, we wanted to see just how big the differences are, and why.
A cyclist turned herself in and received a fine after striking a four-year-old girl who was crossing the street to catch a school bus.
A man who was bitten by two sharks in the Bahamas said Thursday he's 'thankful that I'm here' while sharing his story of survival.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.