You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. It's not the vaccines themselves that are keeping you safe from the worst effects of the coronavirus. It's you. To unpack that, we have Melissa J. Moore, the chief scientific officer at Moderna, who spoke at TED 2020, Ted's first flagship conference in years.

She shares the fascinating promise of what's ahead for messenger RNA vaccines and how they're

ushering in an entirely new era for personalized medicine.

Now, many of the people watching this talk by now will have had one, two, three, or even four doses of a messenger RNA vaccine.

With billions of these shots now in arms, it's clear that this new way of making vaccines is both remarkably safe and incredibly effective.

But did you know it's not the vaccine itself that's

keeping you safe? It's actually you. Because the human body has amazing powers to both prevent

and cure disease by making its own medicines. You just need to know what medicine to make. And that's what your

vaccine gave you, simply a set of instructions for how to protect yourself against SARS-CoV-2.

Now, vaccines are only the beginning. As said before, the advent of MRNA vaccines is heralding in an entirely new era of medicines.

MRNAs give us the ability to not only prevent disease, but also treat previously intractable disorders.

But before I get to that, let's talk about really what is this new way of

medicines really about? Well, it all comes down to proteins. Now, you may think of protein as

simply something that you need to eat, an important part of your diet,

something that's important for you to build muscle.

But it's not just muscle that contains protein.

Protein makes up an huge fraction

of the incredibly complicated ecosystem that's your entire body.

In many ways, your body functions like a large city,

full of myriad buildings, interconnected buildings, with lots of different structures.

Now, just as the word building fails to capture the incredible variety of structures that make up any large city.

The generic term protein gives no clue as to the incredible variety of molecular

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