It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh, and I just spent the last few days at our TED Monterey

2021 conference where engineer Catherine A. Whitehead unpacked just how cool the science is behind

MRNA. MRNA made vaccines against coronavirus possible. In her talk from the TED stage, she explains what was so tricky about getting

mRNA into our cells, which makes the fact that it's working in our bodies that much more

awesome.

What if I told you that the pandemic will save the lives of millions of people?

It's a difficult thing to consider, given how many loved ones we've already lost.

But throughout the course of human history, massive public health crises have resulted in innovation in health care and technology.

For example, the Black Death gave rise to the Gutenberg Press, and the 1918 flu pandemic led to modern vaccine technology.

The COVID-19 pandemic has and will be no different.

Just look at our vaccines,

normally developed over many years,

and the mRNA vaccines were deployed in a mind-blowing 11 months.

How is that even possible? It was possible because scientists have been working

for many years to get us to the point where we could use MRNA quickly in an emergency situation.

Specifically, we've been working on how to help MRNA with its biggest problem,

which is that it doesn't normally go to the right places inside of our bodies.

Fortunately, we got around that problem just in time,

and I'd like to tell you about the technology that we used to do it.

When MRNA is administered, it's injected into our muscles or our bloodstream,

but we actually need it to go inside of our cells.

Unfortunately, MRNA is fragile, and our bodies will destroy it before it goes very far.

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