Katalin Karikó is no stranger to adversity and rejection. Her university’s research program once ran out of money, she has seen her grant applications declined, and she was demoted from a position at another university. Over the years, she struggled to find financial support for her research from colleagues, corporations, and governments.
But during her four decades working as an mRNA researcher, Karikó never stopped believing in the power of mRNA to fight disease. Along with immunologist Drew Weissman, she developed the groundbreaking technology that became the basis of Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, which are helping save lives and slowing the spread of the virus. Their pioneering work has the potential to spur the development of other vaccines, and some have argued that the pair deserves the Nobel Prize.
Growing up in Hungary, Karikó liked watching her father work as a butcher. In 1985, she left the country with her husband and their 2-year-old daughter after her university position was eliminated. With one-way tickets in hand, they hid the equivalent of about $1,200 in their daughter’s teddy bear.
Now a senior vice president of the Germany-based BioNTech, Karikó, who has a doctorate in biochemistry, is known to have spent many mornings getting up at 5 a.m. to work in the basement lab of her Pennsylvania home. “When I am knocked down I know how to pick myself up,” she told the (London) Telegraph. “But I always enjoyed working.… I imagined all of the diseases I could treat.”
As for the owner of that teddy bear? She became a two-time Olympic gold medalist in rowing. Determination, it seems, runs in the family.
