Katalin Karikó

Dear Commons Community,

Last week, Katalin Karikó was announced the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside her colleague Drew Weissman. The two had worked together at the University of Pennsylvania on messenger-RNA research that paved the way for Covid-19 vaccines. But Karikó was not always embraced by her scientific community, and in the days since the prize was announced, national news headlines and social-media commentaries have seized on her story. After years of unsuccessful attempts to obtain grant funding, Penn demoted her and cut her pay in the late 1990s. Years later, she was told she was “not of faculty quality” and kicked out of her lab space. And a paper she and Weissman published in 2005 was initially desk-rejected by Nature, which considered it an “incremental contribution.” (The paper appeared in Immunity instead.)

It was that paper that, 15 years later, became a blueprint for the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives around the world. Karikó and Weissman’s work “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system” and enabled vaccines for the virus to be created and distributed inside of a year, the Nobel Prize committee wrote.

Karikó, who is originally from Hungary, has described the challenges she faced as a scientist in media interviews through the years and in her memoir, Breaking Through: My Life in Science, being released next week. But her story drew exponentially more attention after last week’s announcement. It especially struck a nerve with scientists and academics on social media, who seized upon Karikó’s recounting, in an interview on the Nobel website, of being “kicked out from Penn” and “forced to retire.” It felt like fitting karmic payback that the ambitious scientist who’d never managed to land a high-profile grant and was shut out by a high-profile academic institution was now a Nobel laureate.

Read more of her story at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Tony

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