2019 was a fantastic year in my career. We sent out mouse melanoma lines to Israel and L.A., resulting in the publication in Cell and Nature Commun. In the spring I visited the lab of my friend Hannah Carter at UCSD, enjoying the time of mixing with her graduate students and postdocs at San Diego. I also visited the lab of the late Nobel Laureate Roger Tsien, and tried to find where the discoverer of GFP gene, Douglas Prasher, ended up with. We submitted our manuscript to Nature Medicine, and the reviewers' comments looked promising. Things were good.

In the early summer, I was trying to choose a meeting to attend in FY 2020. Since my studies have focused on immunotherapy for melanoma for a few years, I wanted to go to a cancer immunology meeting. There were two good choices: AACR Cancer Immunology Meeting at Paris, France, or Association for Cancer Immunotherapy (CIMT) annual meeting constantly held in Mainz, Germany.

Paris! The City of Light where I always wanted to visit but had never. I am a big fan of the musical, Les Miserables, and the movies of Juliet Binoche. There were too many things to see: the institute built by Louis Pasteur; Jacob and Monod; the opera house where Mucha's poster was hung... Oh, for sure I also wanted to visit my good friend Celine, who is a PI in INSERM.

However, Mainz meeting was also an attraction, because the local organizer, Ugur Sahin, is a very accomplished melanoma researcher. He worked on the RNA vaccine against neoantigens in melanoma, a topic that interests me very much. I admire his research and am a loyal reader of his papers, which are elegant in both concept and writing. If I attended the meeting, I got a chance to discuss with him.

Eventually I chose to go to Paris; who won't, right? The meeting was fantastic; all the big names in melanoma research was there, including my collaborators Yardena Samuels and Jennifer Wargo. I learned a lot and talked to many melanoma researchers. I visited Louvre Museum with friends. Celine guided me to the streets in Paris, and visited the cafe decorated by Mucha's design. It couldn't be better.

Two months after I returned from Paris, there was a rumor that a mystic flu happened in China. In two months, COVID began to spread all over the world. Sahin and his wife founded a small biotech that he and his wife founded, BioNTech, to develop vaccine for treatment of cancer, especially melanoma. Upon the moment that COVID was becoming a global pandemic, they repurpose the RNA technology in BioNTech to generate the very first RNA vaccine for COVID. Later they partnered with Pfizer to produce and distribute it globally. It was reported that Mainz became the town with highest income in Germany.

I never regret my decision to choose the meeting in Paris, which fascinated me in every way. However, every some time I couldn't help but thinking, how cool it would be to discuss RNA vaccine technology with the couple whose vision literally saved the world.