2023 NOBEL PRIZE: MEDICINE Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman PHYSICS Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier

MEDICINE: By Staff Reporters

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Dr. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman MD PhD just received the Nobel Prize in medicine. Their study of mRNA led to the development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

Oiginally from Hungary, Kariko joined the University of Pennsylvania as a research assistant professor in 1989 to study mRNA. Her grant proposals were constantly rejected, while the rest of the scientific community was slow to catch on to her groundbreaking research. She was never paid more than $60,000 a year. And it was only through a chance encounter at the photocopier that she began to work with Weissman, currently the director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation.

The two made the discovery of a lifetime in 2005—that mRNA can be manipulated and injected into the body to activate an immune response. The major academic journals Science and Nature rejected their paper, which received little fanfare even after being published in a less prestigious journal.

So, in 2013, Karikó left Penn for a job at BioNTech where she still works today. And, of course, their breakthrough came in handy during the global pandemic.

Thanks largely to Karikó and Weissman, mRNA vaccine technology, Moderna and BioNTech are working on mRNA vaccines for RSV, HIV, Zika, malaria, shingles, flu, and cancer.

RSV Tests: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2023/09/25/rsv-vaccine-cdc-oks-pfizer-maternal-shots/

DNA: Testing: https://wordpress.com/post/medicalexecutivepost.com/395273

DANGER: DNA Self-Testing: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2021/04/25/the-potential-dangers-of-testing-your-own-dna/

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PHYSICS: By Staff Reporters

And, three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics yesterday for their work on how electrons move around the atom during the tiniest fractions of seconds, a field that could one day lead to better electronics or disease diagnoses.

The award went to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for their study of the tiny part of each atom that races around the center and that is fundamental to virtually everything: chemistry, physics, our bodies and our gadgets.

The movements of electrons inside atoms and molecules are so rapid that they are measured in attoseconds – an almost incomprehensibly short unit of time. “An attosecond is to one second as one second is to the age of the universe,” the committee explained.

“They were able to, in a sense, provide an illumination tool that allows us to watch the assembly of molecules: how things come together to make a molecule,” Bob Rosner, president of the American Physical Society and a professor at the University of Chicago, told CNN.

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WOMEN: Gaining Economic Earnings Influence

Physician Salary Pay Gap Comparisons

By Staff Reporters

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Physician Salary Pay Gap Follow-Up: https://medicalexecutivepost.com/2023/04/14/physician-salary-pay-gap/

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Women earn as much as or more than their husbands in just under half of US opposite-sex marriages, a significant advancement for economic equality from past decades, according to a new Pew Research study.

  • Sixteen percent of wives in opposite-sex marriages are the sole or primary breadwinners in their home (“primary” meaning they make more than 60% of the household’s income). This share is triple the 5% of women breadwinners from 50 years ago.
  • In 29% of marriages, both spouses bring home about the same income.

But, according to MorningBrew, in marriages where both partners have the same income, women spend about four-and-a-half more hours per week on chores and care giving than men.

And when women become the house’s primary income earner, little really changes about how much time either partner spends on chores, Pew found. But in this scenario, men report almost five more hours of leisure time per week than men in egalitarian households

CITE: https://www.r2library.com/Resource/Title/0826102549

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DAILY UPDATE: The Bitcoin Boost Up!

By Staff Reporters

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Bitcoin prices climbed to as high as $27,293 last week, wrapping up the cryptocurrency’s best week since January 2021. And it has Silicon Valley Bank and friends to thank for it. Crypto diehards claim bitcoin’s gains are the result of people losing faith in traditional banking after SVB and Signature imploded (though it’s worth noting that Signature was a big player in the crypto world).

However, after the second-and third-biggest bank failures in history, economists started second-guessing whether the Fed would stick to the plan to hike interest rates again or change course to protect the rest of the very fragile banking industry. That could mean the crypto market, which slid into the dreaded Crypto Winter in the first half of last year because of macroeconomic factors like the Fed’s rate hikes, might finally be approaching spring.

So, according to MorningBrew, the Fed’s interest rate decision next week will likely serve as crypto’s redeux. And despite the banking industry hoping Jerome Powell pauses the interest rate hikes, February’s inflation numbers showed that the Fed may need to stick to its original plan to keep inflation in check.

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ORDER: https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Health-Information-Technology-Security/dp/0826149952/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254413315&sr=1-5

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BREAKING NEWS: Oil, Distressed Banks and Banking

By Staff Reporters

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Saudi Aramco made what is s probably the “highest net income ever recorded in the corporate world,” Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser just said. The state-owned oil giant brought in an astonishing $161.1 billion in net income in 2022, up 46.5% from the previous year. Rising oil prices lifted all energy companies last year, but Aramco raked in almost triple ExxonMobil’s 2022 profits (record for any Western oil company).

So, after getting mixed signals about the economy from Friday’s jobs report, the Fed will take a fine-toothed comb to the consumer price index, which drops tomorrow.

CITE: https://www.r2library.com/Resource/Title/082610254

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Banks: At the end of an extremely stressful weekend, depositors of collapsed Silicon Valley Bank were told they would be made whole. Yesterday evening, the US government informed anxious SVB depositors that they’d have access to all the money they stashed with the lender today, even if the amount exceeded the $250,000 limit insured by the FDIC. In addition to backstopping depositors, the Fed is offering additional funding to some banks to limit the contagion from spreading across the banking sector.

And, according to MorningBrew, the Fed’s aggressive action shows how the implosion of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday could have quickly turned into a full-blown banking crisis when markets open this morning.

  • Banking is a confidence game, and if people and businesses felt their uninsured deposits were at risk, they could start pulling money from other banks in a catastrophic bank run.
  • The government had a hard deadline of 9:30am ET this morning to restore confidence in the banking system, and it beat it.
  • However, in their announcement, regulators also noted the closure of a second bank, New York-based Signature Bank, over “systemic risk.” All of Signature’s depositors will be made whole, they said.

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ALERT: HSBC Holdings PLC just said that it purchased Silicon Valley Bank UK Ltd., the U.K. arm of the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank, for 1 pound ($1.20). HSBC said the acquisition will help strengthen its franchise in the U.K. As of March 10th, SVBUK had loans of around GBP5.5 billion and deposits of around GBP6.7 billion, while tangible equity is expected to be around GBP1.4 billion. The acquisition was completed immediately.

The Bank of England said it took the decision to sell SVBUK to stabilize the business, ensure continuity of banking services, minimize disruption to the country’s technology sector and support confidence in the financial system.

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ORDER: https://www.routledge.com/Comprehensive-Financial-Planning-Strategies-for-Doctors-and-Advisors-Best/Marcinko-Hetico/p/book/9781482240283

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