The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19
nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covi...Posted Nov 11, 2020, 8:48 AM UTC
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nytimes.com
Congrats to these two Turks 🎉
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Sweet!
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Congratulations to this 2 Germans, they were educated in Germany not in Turkey.
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Doesn't change the fact that they're ethnically Turkish.
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Yes, but Germany produced the know how, if they were in Turkey they wouldn't have been able to do this, hence Germany produced the vaccine not turkey.
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Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess. Just pointing out your error that they are Germans, they're not.
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That’s how it works, did anyone say Steve Jobs is Syrian Swiss German? Nope, he’s American. So yes that’s how it works around the world. They are German.
On a side note, I would rather say encouraging words towards immigrants and their contribution and hard work to wherever they go in the world, it’s good to see immigrants or refugees contributing to the society and putting hard work as a true citizen; that’s a more humble comment to make instead, rather than focusing on the fact that he is Turkish.
I have nothing against Turks, I have plenty of friends from there, but making a comment like this, is unnecessary
Congratulations to these geniuses with their innovation and may they prosper and grow further
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thank you for the long note. Is there a rule, preventing people from having multiple nationalities ? I think, there is no impediment against calling Jobs ‘syrian’ , ‘american’ and/or ‘syrian-american’.
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There isn’t any rule really, but common sense I guess, when you are a citizen of a country, in news report or public speaking, they’d refer to you based on what citizenship you have or of which country you are citizen of, then comes the ethnicity and origins or background of the person
You can see models, singers, actors, they refer to them as American, or British or etc.... based on their citizenship, but if you want to know more about them you can research and dig deeper about their roots, nothing wrong with that, but it’s all based on their citizenship generally
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‘Common sense’ is not a tool that we can employ to reach facts. Because, popularity of behavior does not refer to any source of truth.
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Please don’t
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Don’t start with the turkish german bullshit. Hundreds of people worked on it. Germans and Americans by nationality, funding, and innovation. So leave races out of the mix.
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Why do people try to slap Americans in invention they played no role in?
German bio tech company, with Turkish/German owners and staff, received a loan from EU and Grant from Germany.
Can't mention the Turks, but you want to sneak Americans in there who played no role in developing the vaccine.
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Someone's triggered.
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Listen to Prof. Dr. Ugur Sahin, CEO, BioNTech, speaking at the World’s Top 50 Innovators 2019
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I thought Mike Pence developed the vaccine?!?!
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Mother will not be pleased.
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lol, and he couldn’t have done it without his fly
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Upon one time there was a Pence His name was Mike, he made no sense He stood there looking like a doll Made Tony Fauci take the fall For hypocritical mistakes Got COVID once without the aches And then upon one dreary night A buzzing insect’s warm delight When placed atop a strand of hair It’s family jewels it starts to bare With soiled scalp it starts to run The wholesome fun has just begun
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Immigrants get the fucking job done. Congrats to these two and all the scientists that contributed! I’m actually pretty happy that this isn’t coming from warp speed because we’d never hear the end of it from republicans.
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I’m so happy they weren’t american! As a country we needed to be taken down a few (hundred) pegs. If we had developed the vaccine, you know we’d make other countries bid for it and we’d ignore countries of black and brown people if they didn’t fork over the green.
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That's petty as hell and untrue. Do you really think the US does nothing to help other countries based on race? Just because we had an asshole in the Whitehouse doesn't mean we don't spend millions and millions and send thousands of people on humanitarian missions. Try to revive your hope in humanity and turn off cnn for a couple hours a day
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Uğur Şahin moved to Germany with his parents when he was 4 and Özlem Türeci was born in Germany, it's a bit silly to call them immigrants.
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Is this Gretchen and Elliott?
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My exact sentiments
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They look faceswapped
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Yo I was thinking the same thing. I feel hella shallow just thinken of it but damn wtf.
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Lol definitely not proud of noticing but the internet has me trained
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Hey if you hadn’t said it it would have been another trained karma seeking slut cough cough I mean myself.
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And this is why I ❤️reddit
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It looked like portlandia clip with Fred Armenia and that man lady side kick from the thumbnails
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Very touching story.
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heroes
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Thought this was Fred Armison for a brief moment
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They must make sweet sweet love
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Why should it?
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Damn. Hopefully they don’t poison us all 👍🏼
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“Government agrees to buy vaccine” is very different from “government provides funding for development of vaccine.”
I agreed to buy an iPhone. That doesn’t mean I contributed a single penny to develop the iPhone.
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Lol it doesn’t admit to shit, here’s the quote that precedes what you cherry-picked:
“The truth is that Pfizer didn’t receive any funding from Operation Warp Speed for the development, clinical trial and manufacturing of the vaccine. Rather, its partner, BioNTech, has received money — from the German government.”
It goes on to talk about BioNTech’s contribution of RNA technology, its history with working with Pfizer on flu vaccines, and how they started human trials in April. THEN, the US committed to buying the vaccines already in human trials.
You fuck.
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Remember this comment when you tried to tell people that Trump gave Pfizer $1.8 billion to fund research and then you tried to twist your words to mean something different so you wouldn’t sound like a idiot with your thumb in your butt?
You sound like an idiot with your thumb in your butt.
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Behind paywall.
The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Leading Vaccine to Solve Covid-19
The German company BioNTech, founded by two scientists, has teamed up with Pfizer on a vaccine that was found to be more than 90 percent effective. David Gelles
By David Gelles
Two years ago, Dr. Ugur Sahin took the stage at a conference in Berlin and made a bold prediction. Speaking to a roomful of infectious disease experts, he said his company might be able to use its so-called messenger RNA technology to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic.
At the time, Dr. Sahin and his company, BioNTech, were little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. BioNTech, which Dr. Sahin founded with his wife, Dr. Özlem Türeci, was mostly focused on cancer treatments. It had never brought a product to market. Covid-19 did not yet exist.
But his words proved prophetic.
On Monday, BioNTech and Pfizer announced that a vaccine for the coronavirus developed by Dr. Sahin and his team was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected. The stunning results vaulted BioNTech and Pfizer to the front of the race to find a cure for a disease that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide.
“It could be the beginning of the end of the Covid era,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview on Tuesday.
BioNTech began work on the vaccine in January, after Dr. Sahin read an article in the medical journal The Lancet that left him convinced that the coronavirus, at the time spreading quickly in parts of China, would explode into a full-blown pandemic. Scientists at the company, based in Mainz, Germany, canceled vacations and set to work on what they called Project Lightspeed.
“There are not too many companies on the planet which have the capacity and the competence to do it so fast as we can do it,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview last month. “So it felt not like an opportunity, but a duty to do it, because I realized we could be among the first coming up with a vaccine.”
After BioNTech had identified several promising vaccine candidates, Dr. Sahin concluded that the company would need help to rapidly test them, win approval from regulators and bring the best candidate to market. BioNTech and Pfizer had been working together on a flu vaccine since 2018, and in March, they agreed to collaborate on a coronavirus vaccine.
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Since then, Dr. Sahin, who is Turkish, has developed a friendship with Albert Bourla, the Greek chief executive of Pfizer. The pair said in recent interviews that they had bonded over their shared backgrounds as scientists and immigrants.
“We realized that he is from Greece, and that I’m from Turkey,” Dr. Sahin said, without mentioning their native countries’ long-running antagonism. “It was very personal from the very beginning.” ImageDr. Sahin is the chief executive of BioNTech. Dr. Sahin is the chief executive of BioNTech.Credit...Felix Schmitt/Contact Press Images
Dr. Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor, and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.
Early in his career, he met Dr. Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul. On the day they were married, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci returned to the lab after the ceremony.
The pair were initially focused on research and teaching, including at the University of Zurich, where Dr. Sahin worked in the lab of Rolf Zinkernagel, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine.
In 2001, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies.
After several years they founded BioNTech as well, looking to use a wider range of technologies, including messenger RNA, to treat cancer. “We want to build a large European pharmaceutical company,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview with the Wiesbaden Courier, a local paper.
Even before the pandemic, BioNTech was gaining momentum. The company raised hundreds of millions of dollars and now has more than 1,800 people on staff, with offices in Berlin, other German cities and Cambridge, Mass. In 2018, it began its partnership with Pfizer. Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $55 million to fund its work treating H.I.V. and tuberculosis. Also in 2019, Dr. Sahin was awarded the Mustafa Prize, a biennial Iranian prize for Muslims in science and technology. Image Dr. Türeci is the chief medical officer of BioNTech. Dr. Türeci is the chief medical officer of BioNTech.Credit...Felix Schmitt/Contact Press Images-Focus
Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci sold Ganymed for $1.4 billion in 2016. Last year, BioNTech sold shares to the public; in recent months, its market value has soared past $21 billion, making the couple among the richest in Germany.
The two billionaires live with their teenage daughter in a modest apartment near their office. They ride bicycles to work. They do not own a car.
“Ugur is a very, very unique individual,” Mr. Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, said in the interview last month. “He cares only about science. Discussing business is not his cup of tea. He doesn’t like it at all. He’s a scientist and a man of principles. I trust him 100 percent.” Image Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer. Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer.Credit...Bryan Derballa for The New York Times
In Germany, where immigration continues to be a fractious issue, the success of two scientists of Turkish descent was cause for celebration.
“With this couple, Germany has a shining example of successful integration,” wrote the conservative-business site Focus.
A member of Parliament, Johannes Vogel, wrote on Twitter that if it was up to the far-right Alternative for Germany party, “there would be no #BioNTech of Germany with Özlem Türeci & Ugur Sahin at the top.”
“If it were up to critics of capitalism and globalization,” he added, “there would be no cooperation with Pfizer. But that makes us strong: immigration country, market economy & open society!”
Dr. Sahin has had little time for politics this year. BioNTech has been so busy developing a vaccine that the company has not finalized the financial details of its partnership agreement with Pfizer.
“Trust and personal relationship is so important in such business, because everything is going so fast,” Dr. Sahin said. “We still have a term sheet and not yet a final contract on many things.”
Dr. Sahin said he and Dr. Türeci learned about efficacy data on Sunday night and marked the moment by brewing Turkish tea at home. “We celebrated, of course,” he said. “It was a relief.”
What a bunch of asshats.
Bad way of putting it, but the Turkish minority in Germany is often only thought of as a problem.
Yes and that stance is the problem.
Explain please
These people imply that the person's worth is intrinsic to their contribution to society. That's problematic and awful for obvious reasons.
Thanks fwend!
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I could read it all (Australia).
Same (Europe)
Same here (Canada)
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