The Vaccine

An account of how BioNTech — a Mainz company built to make individualised mRNA cancer therapies, with no vaccine product and no manufacturing at scale — designed a COVID-19 vaccine candidate in a weekend in January 2020 and had it authorised before the end of the year. Written by the Financial Times journalist Joe Miller with the company’s founders, the married scientists Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin, and published in 2021. It covers the pivot decision, the Pfizer partnership, the scramble for lipid nanoparticle supply and fill-finish capacity, and the regulatory compression, from inside the firm.

Why it’s on the list: Assigned in the University of Austin’s Foundations of Science II course, alongside Doudna and Sternberg on CRISPR, Francis Collins on belief, and Nick Lane on mitochondria. It is the course’s case study in how a scientific platform becomes a deployed product under time pressure — the messy institutional half of science that a textbook leaves out.

Where I saw it: On the University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list, “65 Texts Our Students Are Reading”, November 13 2025, saved to Kyle’s “Books To Read” Apple Note. The full 65-text curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
• Power, Sex, Suicide — the other Foundations of Science II text in this shard.
• Moderna — the other company that brought an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to authorisation in 2020, on a parallel track.
• Scientific Progress — a compressed-timeline example of it.