On September 24, 2021, the Lasker Foundation announced the winners of its 2021 Lasker Awards: Dieter Oesterhelt (Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry), Peter Hegemann (Humboldt University of Berlin) and Karl Deisseroth (Stanford University) will receive the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for their work in optogenetics; Katalin Karikó (BioNTech) and Drew Weissman (University of Pennsylvania) will be honored with the Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for their work on mRNA vaccines; and David Baltimore (California Institute of Technology) will receive the Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science for his lifetime of outstanding science. Widely regarded as America's top biomedical research prize, the Lasker Awards carry an honorarium of $250,000 for each category. Due to the pandemic, the Foundation will not be presenting the Awards this year in a traditional in-person ceremony. Instead, a virtual awards announcement is viewable at laskerfoundation.org. BioQuick News encourages you to click on the links to the full Lasker citations to read in-depth descriptions of the work that is being honored. These links are provided below at the end of each award summary. BioQuick also encourages you to read the BioQuick News article on mRNA vaccines.