Virus vaccine marks ‘the hour of the immigrants’
It was a relief to wake up to the comforting news that the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer has achieved a breakthrough in developing a vaccine against the coronavirus. After having listened to NPR, I called my husband as it is my morning routine — who greeted me with the same good message, only that this time the German company BioNTech was given credit for it. How come?
The simple answer is that both companies had joined forces some months ago with the American heavyweight giving the German company, only in the 12th year of its existence, a robust financial boost. Interestingly enough, the only media that acknowledged the crucial role of the German partner was the New York Times in their evening edition, whereas the nonprint media I had listened to during the day celebrated it as a sole American victory.
Don’t misunderstand me, it is not my hurt ego as a native German that motivated me to write this, it was another astounding fact: The CEOs of the two respective companies on either side of the Atlantic are both immigrants. Although I cannot rightfully call myself an immigrant as I don’t seem to settle down anywhere permanently, I can relate to the experience of living outside the country one grew up in. Shortly after getting my PhD in history, l joined my husband, a German diplomat, in traveling the world and found myself working in places as diverse as Nairobi or New York City. Our “gypsy life” also explains why I call my husband on WhatsApp in the morning rather than just talk to him over breakfast: He currently lives in Brazil whereas I am spending a good part of my time in Houston.
BioNTech’s founder and CEO Ugur Sahin was born in Turkey and was 4 years old when his parents followed the trail of so many other “guest workers” — as they were called in Germany in those days — and moved to Cologne where his father worked in a Ford factory. Ugur studied medicine (university including medical school is free in Germany, therefore having financial means is not a prerequisite) in his new home town and rose to the rank of professor of oncology. His wife and co-founder Özlem Türeci, a medical doctor as wellwho serves as chief medical officer, was born in Germany as the daughter of a Turkish physician who had previously immigrated. The couple combined their scientific expertise and entrepreneurial spirit and founded BioNTech in 2008, primarily dedicated to the research of immunotherapies for cancer patients and of vaccines for infectious diseases. Both ride their bikes to their plant in the city of Mainz each morning, despite the fact that they garnered more than $1 billion euros when they sold Ganymed in 2016, another biotech company the ingenious couple had founded some years earlier.
I don’t know which means of transportation Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, uses to get to work, but what he has in common with his transatlantic counterparts is being an immigrant as well. Born and educated in Greece (in Thessaloniki for my Greek friends), he was already a marriedman in his mid-30s when he ventured to the United States to join Pfizer. Traditionally — whatever that means — Greeks and Turks are not necessarily considered being fond of each other, at least this is what governments and the official “public opinion” claim. So this is another twist which delights me: Turkish and Greek immigrants working together on two different continents, in countries they were not born in, for the good of mankind. And as if this weren’t enough, they also belong to two different religions, Sahin being Muslim and Bourla hailing from the old Jewish community of Thessaloniki. Both emphasized in an interview that they forged an immediate personal bond based on the common experience of being an immigrant which outweighed all other differences.
Being thrown into a different culture, having to adjust to a new environment forces one to review things one took for granted, to find new ways to tackle life and thus becoming creative and sometimes even ingenious. Immigration is one of the driving forces to advance mankind.
There might be “Hours of the Demagogues,” as I called one of my previous essays, but today there is undoubtedly “The Hour of the Immigrants.”