Page 22 - English 10 | Games and Activities-9

THEME 9 APPENDIX

9 Racing Guesses (1) 10 GRADE
th

Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin are both the children of Turkish parents who moved to Germany
in the late 1960s. Uğur Şahin, 56, was born in İskenderun. Because of his father’s job, he was
taken to Germany when he was four. He grew up in Cologne and studied medicine at the
University of Cologne.
54-year-old Özlem Türeci grew up in Lastrup, Germany. She is the daughter of a father who
worked as a surgeon at a small hospital there. They got married in 2002 and had a daughter
four years later.
Mainz is the place where they have been based in since 2001. They wanted to found a research
lab at Mainz University to investigate how immune systems could be developed to attack
cancerous cells. However, they couldn’t do it because of inadequate funding. So, they founded
their first company on their own in 2001. Then, in 2008, they founded their second company
with Christopher Huber. Uğur Şahin has been the chief executive officer (CEO), Özlem Türeci
has been the chief medical officer of this company and Christopher Huber has been sitting
as a member of the supervisory board.
When Uğur Şahin read about Covid-19 in early 2020, relying on years of experience with
the mRNA method, he called his employees to focus on developing a coronavirus vaccine. A
well-known US pharmaceutical company was also convinced to support the development
and distribution costs, and the breakthrough arrived in early November when the company
reported a 95 percent efficacy of their Covid-19 vaccine.
Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin are undeniably two of the greatest modern heroes and heroines
of today as they managed to put forward a solution to protect humanity from a virus that
has killed more than five million people and make a pandemic come to an end.

Ortaöğretim Genel Müdürlüğü Öğretim Programları ve Ders Kitapları Daire Başkanlığı 235