International Women’s Day

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Patel (CB) [V]]

Noble Baronesses and noble Lords, today I wish to pay tribute to the women scientists who literally have saved the world. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, has given me a lead by mentioning two of them.

SARS-CoV-2—a virus and the disease it causes—was first identified in China just over a year ago. The world did not know then how serious a pandemic was about to follow. It is an incredible feat for scientists to have developed vaccines against the virus in less than a year. The story of the science that led to that is remarkable.

While Brenner and Watson—two Nobel Prize winners —and others identified messenger RNA, it was hard to programme it and to get it into human cells. In 2005, Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian émigrée to the USA, showed how to tweak synthetic mRNA and get it into human cells. Her research was not thought important and she was not granted a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. She was hoping to develop treatments for cancers, and her research excited many to try to develop cancer therapies. Among them was Özlem Türeci, a Turkish émigrée to Germany, a scientist and a doctor who, with her husband, founded the company BioNTech. A young scientist at Stanford University, on hearing of Karikó’s work, founded a company called Moderna—the name says it all—to develop cancer therapies. Karikó’s research also led to gene editing and earned Nobel Prizes for two women, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.

With the outbreak of Covid-19, Türeci in Germany and Moderna in the USA switched their research to try to develop vaccines using messenger RNA. A young African-American woman scientist, named Kizzmekia “Kizzy” Corbett, working with Dr Fauci at the NIH laboratory, joined the team at Moderna, working to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. Türeci, BioNTech and Pfizer in Germany, and Kizzy and Moderna in the USA, developed the two mRNA vaccines.

As we have heard, before that, Professor Sarah Gilbert at Oxford—mentioned by the noble Baronesses, Lady Deech and Lady Brady—with experience of developing vaccines related to Ebola and MERS, started working day and night to develop a vector-based vaccine as soon as the genome of Covid-19 was known. It is said that she worked from 4 am until late at night. Her ambition was to develop a stable and cheap vaccine for Covid-19, so that the poor countries of the world could benefit. She achieved this in record time, with a vaccine now known as the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. I have personally benefitted from it, having had my first dose. Professor Sarah Gilbert is a remarkable scientist.

The science behind the development of these vaccines underpins other vaccines that are developed in other countries. These four women are the saviours of the world through the vaccines they helped develop. I hope they will all share a Nobel Prize.

Of course, there are many other remarkable women who have helped and continue to help the recovery from Covid—Professor Sharon Peacock from the University of Cambridge for one, and I hope she does not mind me calling her the “queen of genomic sequencing”. Her contribution to identifying mutations cannot be overstated. The fact that the UK leads in the genomic sequencing of Covid-19 is thanks to her.

Time does not allow me to speak about the many other women scientists and their contributions. We need more women to do STEM subjects and to go into science research, and more women in leadership positions in research. Currently, the numbers are less than 30%. What plans do the Government have to increase the number of girls doing STEM subjects and to increase the number of women in science research?