IIn May 2013, Katalin Karikó arrived for work at her lab at the University of Pennsylvania to find her belongings piled up in the hallway. “There were my binders, my posters, my boxes of test tubes,” she recalls. Nearby, a lab technician was shoving things into a trash can. “My stuff!” Karikó realized.
Despite working at the tiny lab for years, the scientist – then in her 50s – was fired without notice for not bringing in “sufficient dollars per net square footage.” In short, she did not attract enough grants to justify the meager space she occupied.
“That lab is going to be a museum one day,” Karikó hissed at the manager who had kicked her out. Those were strange but prophetic words, as made clear in this riveting, poignant story of the trials of a scientist now recognized as one of the world’s greatest biochemists, a woman who helped create the vaccines that killed millions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Karikó comes from a humble background in central Hungary and grew up in a one-room house that was heated by a solitary stove in the winter and had no running water. Her father had to work as a laborer when he was fired from his job as a master butcher after harming the local Communist party officials.
It was a hard life, but a loving one, like breakthrough public. Her family was close and the state at least encouraged education. And Karikó was a worker. “I don’t consider myself particularly smart, but what I lacked in natural abilities, I could make up for with effort,” she says.
She took summer science classes, became a biology student at Szeged University and eventually earned a PhD there. At the age of 22, she fell in love with Béla Francia, an apprentice mechanic five years her junior. They married, and in 1982 Karikó gave birth to their daughter, Susan. Two years later they moved to the US with their entire savings – around £900 – sewn into Susan’s teddy bear to avoid Hungary’s currency restrictions.
By now, Karikó had become obsessed with messenger RNA (mRNA), the material responsible for translating our DNA into proteins, the molecules that make us up. Most importantly, mRNA is extremely difficult to work with because it is fragile and short-lived. But Karikó was convinced that it could play a major role in medicine and constantly fought for it to be a research focus. Few colleagues agreed and called her “the crazy mRNA lady”.
However, such labels were a minor headache. At Temple University, in Philadelphia, where she began her work in the US, her principal, Robert Suhadolnik – after initially being supportive – tried to have her deported because she had the audacity to accept a position at another looking for university.
Eventually, she moved to the University of Pennsylvania. Again, things went well at first, but as she maintained her mRNA obsession, the university began to criticize her failure to attract grants. She was demoted, denied tenure, had her salary cut and eventually found her belongings dumped in a hallway.
Fortunately for Karikó – and the rest of the world – her obsession with mRNA was now shared by several other scientists and she was snapped up by the German company BioNTech to start working on mRNA medicines.
The rest is scientific history. When Covid-19 struck, BioNTech and Karikó realized they were in an excellent position to tackle the pandemic, and with the support of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, they developed a vaccine that played a key role in saving the planet to help protect against the worst vicissitudes of coronavirus.
How this success affected Karikó is explained in one of the most moving moments in breakthrough. She returned to Penn to receive one of the first Covid injections administered in the US. Karikó was spotted in the crowd and she, as a vaccine inventor, was hailed with roars of approval. “My eyes went blurry,” she recalls.
This is a vividly written, absorbing memoir of a life filled with triumphs (including her daughter Susan’s own successes as an Olympic gold medalist) over almost constant adversity. However, the exact reasons for the ongoing undermining of her research and academic standing are left open breakthrough suggests that science today suffers because it requires its practitioners to publish papers in numbers rather than merit and to seek grants for safe research as opposed to risky but potentially ground-breaking work. Quantity not quality has become a career driver.
Ironically, the last laugh is missing for Karikó breakthrough. Together with Drew Weissman, she won the Nobel Prize for physiology in October 2023 – too late for inclusion in her book. What those who thwarted her research must think of this final success can only be guessed. However, one thing is clear. Her old lab may not be a museum yet, but it sure will be one day.
