mRNA vaccines

In 2020, vaccines for COVID-19 built on messenger RNA reach the public. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman had solved, years earlier, how to modify RNA so the immune system would not reject it on sight. BioNTech with Pfizer, and Moderna, turn that into a vaccine in months once the virus's gene sequence is published.

The contribution is a medicine that is an instruction. Instead of growing a weakened virus, you send cells a temporary recipe to make one protein. The platform can be retargeted when a new sequence is known. That is the closest real merge of biology and information technology on this timeline, and it does one job.

It depends on the genome-era ability to read a sequence fast, and on decades of RNA research that were not famous before 2020. It does not depend on robots or chatbots.

The vaccines reduce severe disease. They are not a universal virus shield, and the technology's other medical uses are still early.