A Memorable Moment During This Pandemic

When hundreds of people in Philadelphia stood and cheered and cried.

On May 5, 2022, The Franklin Institute, a science museum in Philadelphia, held its annual Gala. Because of the pandemic, the Gala had been suspended the previous two years. Now everyone was back. More than 500 people flooded Memorial Hall, home to the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial, where a 20-foot-high marble statue of Franklin stands.

The Franklin Institute is one of the oldest centers of science education in the United States. Founded on February 5, 1824, the Institute offers a series of yearly awards in science, engineering, and business. Previous winners of the Franklin Institute Awards have included Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking. More recent laureates have included Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Blackburn, and Bill Gates.

None of these award ceremonies, however, had the emotional intensity of the 2022 event. The award winners that night included Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, two of the researchers who had invented the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, Albert Bourla and Stéphane Bancel, the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna, respectively, who had supervised the development and mass production of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, and Alex Gorsky, the CEO of Johnson and Johnson, the company that developed the vectored virus Covid-19 vaccines.

Normally, each of the recipients stands up to accept the award, nods toward the audience, and sits down. After all the winners have been announced and their accomplishments described, the moderator, who on this night was Derek Pitts, the chief astronomer at The Franklin Institute, announces that the ceremony is over. The audience then quietly files out of Memorial Hall and walks upstairs to eat dinner.

But not on this night.

On this night everyone stood and clapped and hugged and cried as the award winners stood on the stage embracing each other. It had been two years since SARS-CoV-2 virus had entered the United States. Immunologically, we were a blank slate. Families had been torn apart; businesses had closed; schools had been shuttered; travel had been severely restricted; and people had been isolated and quarantined. We were scared to pass someone on the street, knowing that the virus could be transmitted by people without symptoms. We talked to each other behind masks.

Now the fog had lifted. And in the center of the clearing stood people who had offered a ticket out of this pandemic; finally, a way to prevent almost all this suffering and hospitalization and death. In the almost 200-year history of the Franklin Institute, never had the impact of scientific discoveries been so immediate, heartfelt, and spontaneous. For all of us in attendance that night, it was a defining moment.