ICYMI - Heroes of the pandemic: Meet the Canadian hockey dad behind COVID-19 vaccine developer Moderna
Derrick Rossi was at his vacation home overlooking Squam Lake, New Hampshire, on a recent afternoon, chatting away on Facetime as the sun poured through the window behind him, a burst of radiant afternoon light not completely unbefitting the career of a Toronto-born and raised molecular biologist.
“We humans, we are real worker bees, everybody has got a job, and they work and they work, and they have a family, and they want to provide as much as they can for their families, but if you step back and say, “Wait a minute, working is really hard, and so what if I didn’t have to work?” Rossi says. “I love science. I’ve done a lot of science, and I am going to keep reading about science, but it doesn’t define me.He could also totally afford to retire in his early 50s.
But about those Canadian roots: Rossi’s father, Fred, worked at an auto body shop. His Mom, Agnes, owned a piece of a Maltese bakery. Neither parent had more than a high school education. They came to Canada. They worked. They raised five kids. Derrick was the baby of the bunch and a super-keen student. He credits Lloyd Lumby’s science class at Dr. Norman Bethune High School in Scarborough with instilling his love of molecular biology.cience took me around the world.
“The real important discovery here was you could now use mRNA, and if you got it into the cells, then you could get the mRNA to express any protein in the cells, and this was the big thing,” Rossi says.
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