Covid-19 vaccines have alerted the world to the power of RNA therapies

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY is not a popularity contest. But if it were, it would be a partisan one. The evolutionary biologists would pledge their allegiance en masse to DNA. The sequences contained in its regular coils knit together the stories of almost all life on the planet. Pharmacologists, being of a more practical bent, would instead vote for proteins. Proteins are not about sequence, but about shape; their complex, irregular outlines, and the ways that they can change, allow them to do almost all of the biological work that gets done in cells. And it is thanks to the way that particular drug molecules fit into those shapes that almost all drugs have their effects.

There would be only a small following for ribonucleic acid (RNA), widely seen as a helpmeet molecule. It could be argued that the production of RNA is DNA’s main purpose; it is certainly true that the production of proteins would be nowhere without it. But it is a backstage operator, not a star; hewing wood and drawing water, hard working but hardly glamorous, appreciated only by devotees.