Sean Carroll

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Many of you are old enough to remember the COVID-19 pandemic.

Slightly joking there.

It wasn't that long ago.

And of course, COVID-19 is still with us.

It hasn't gone away.

But things are very different now than they were in the year 2020.

In 2020, there were

A lot of lockdowns, a lot of prophylactic measures to try to make sure infection rates stayed low.

It was a real global disruption in many ways.

And the world is very different.

It's mostly back to pre-pandemic behaviors, and that's in large part because we have vaccines.

for the virus.

And I think that it's kind of underappreciated and truly astonishing how rapidly those vaccines were developed.

Of course, by now it's become politicized and there are tribal markers and stuff like that.

But put all that aside, let's be reality-based right now.

COVID was bad, the vaccines are wonderful, and they came about very, very quickly.

And you may have heard that it's because they're a special kind of vaccine, mRNA vaccines.

RNA is, of course, the part of our genetic material that transfers the messenger RNA in particular.