evidence: The messenger RNA, or mRNA, platform may be new to the global public, but it’s a technology that researchers had been betting on for decades. Now those bets are paying off, and not just by turning back a pandemic that killed millions in just a year. [...] The story of mRNA vaccines dates back to the early 1990s, when Hungarian-born researcher Katalin Kariko of the University of Pennsylvania started testing mRNA technology as a form of gene therapy. The idea is similar whether scientists want to use the mRNA moleculeto cure disease or prevent it; send instructions to the cells of the body to make something specific. Researchers like to use a cookbook analogy. The body’s DNA is the cookbook. Messenger RNA is a copy of the recipe – one that disappears quickly. In the case of genetic disease, it can be used to instruct cells to make a healthy copy of a protein. In the case of mRNA vaccines, it’s used to tell cells to make what looks like a piece of virus, so the body produces antibodies and special immune system cells in response.