I recently read the book Breaking Through: My Life in Science, by Katalin Kariko. Dr. Kariko is an inventor of the mRNA vaccines and she just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2023. Her story is extraordinarily inspirational. Dr. Kariko was born in Hungary and was dedicated to become a biologist at a very young age. After losing her funding in Hungary, she came to the United States and took a scientist position at Temple University. She devoted herself to scientific discovery but her boss at Temple University was mad at her for considering another position and tried to deport her. Luckily, she ended up getting a position as an assistant research professor at Penn and continued her decades long research on mRNA. At the time, mRNA was not a hot research area and it’s hard to get funding. She made a lot of progress on the research but didn’t receive sufficient funding. She was denied a promotion after 5 years and she was supposed to leave Penn. But she was so dedicated to her research that she decided to take a demotion to stay in the lab. But then her boss who was very supportive of her work left for the industry. She ended up getting a similar position in a different department and continued on her research. In 2006, Dr. Kariko and her collaborator Dr. Drew Weissman published the landmark mRNA paper that details how to deliver mRNA into a cell without inciting immune responses, which was the foundation of the mRNA vaccine. To their surprise, not a lot of people seemed to care about this important discovery. Eventually, she was evicted from her lab space in Penn in 2013 and Penn told her she was not “faculty material”. She ended up taking a position at BioNTech, which designed the Pfizer COVID vaccine where Dr. Kariko was heading the R&D effort.
We all know how the story went. Dr. Kariko was finally recognized after decades of hard work and having to fight a system that didn’t value her contributions and tried to kick her out. But despite being marginalized and belittled, she kept focusing on making one breakthrough after another. She has a very strong value system and she did everything to hold up to her values: scientific integrity and rigor, research that matters, hard work, staying current with the latest research, etc. She refused to change her research focus and pivoted to a *hotter* area. She doesn’t care much about chasing clout, money or power. She focused on doing the right thing despite all the pressures that tried to push her to do other less important things. Basically she stayed hungry, stayed foolish and continued on her mRNA research. The world should thank her for her dedication to mRNA research. She literally saved millions of lives. A Nobel prize very well deserved.
Her daughter, a two-time olympic gold medalist Susan Francia, wrote a tribute after the COVID vaccine came out. It was a beautiful letter and I shed some tears after reading it. I am only able to write a very short summary but Dr. Kariko’s book is a lot richer and very thought provoking. I highly recommend it. In a world full of injustice and short-term thinking, Dr. Kariko’s story gives me a lot of hope. If we all dedicate ourselves to do the right thing and stay on the right track, the world will surely be a much better place.