2023-10-02 16:13:40
Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian biochemist and pioneer of mRNA, who was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize for Medicine together with the American immunologist Drew Weissman, knew from an early age that she wanted to become a scientist, for the discoveries that paved the way in record time for vaccines against Covid. And to achieve her dream of transforming messenger RNA into vaccines and therapies she faced sacrifices and adversities. She also left her country in difficult years, the years of the Iron Curtain. A choice she had to make when the research program of the university she worked for ran out of funding in 1985. There Karikó decided that she had to leave to pursue an academic career. She left with her little daughter and her husband. And her money from the black market sale of the family car sewn into her little girl’s teddy bear. Destination: USA.
Daughter of a butcher and an accountant
Born on January 17, 1955 in Hungary, her father was a butcher and her mother an accountant, and Katalin grew up in the small Hungarian town of Kisujszallas. Following her dream, she obtained her PhD at the University of Szeged and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Biological Research Center. From the beginning, her ‘scientific obsession’ has been mRNA (messenger RNA), the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to the ‘production machine’ of proteins in each cell. She worked hard to realize her dream from this job position, but in 1985 economic difficulties threatened to block the way to her studies. Her story is also told online by the National Women’s History Museum.
The birth of her daughter and the move to the USA
In 1985 Karikó married and had a daughter. At the same time as the growing difficulties for her research activity in Hungary, the scientist receives an offer from Temple University in Philadelphia for another postdoctoral scholarship. Karikó, her husband Bela Francia (an engineer) and her 2-year-old daughter decided to move to the United States for the opportunity at Temple.
The car sold on the black market and the money in the stuffed animal
However, Hungary would only allow the family to take 100 dollars out of the country, which was not enough to start a new life. After selling the family car on the black market, Karikó sewed the proceeds (about $1,246) into her daughter’s teddy bear. In the United States, her husband began managing an apartment complex. Her daughter Susan also made headlines: she won two Olympic gold medals for the United States in rowing, one at the Beijing Games and one at the London Games.
At work every day of the year
Karikó immediately got to work. She spent so much time in her laboratory, sometimes sleeping there, that her husband estimated that she earned about $1 an hour. One year, while she was sitting at her desk, she realized that she had worked every day that year, including New Year’s Eve, a biography of her was reconstructed in her.
The temptation to give up
1995 was another difficult year for Karikó. “Her husband was stuck in Hungary due to visa problems, she had just had a cancer scare,” reconstructs the author of the biography published on the National Women’s History Museum website, “and the University of Pennsylvania had just demoted her from the path to a tenured professorship.With no grant coming in to support his work, Karikó began to think about giving up.
1998 the turning point year
But in 1998 an accident with the photocopier will change her story again, marking the turning point that leads her to the Nobel Prize today. Karikó and Weissman often met at the copy machine, sometimes arguing over who should use it first. One day the scientist told her colleague that she could produce any mRNA. Weissman was interested in the topic, and listened to it. From there the turning point collaboration was born.
It wasn’t a simple life and the scientist told it in some interviews reported in the international media. For example, the biochemist also claimed to “have been blackmailed by the feared Hungarian State Security Service, which threatened to reveal her father’s role in the 1956 revolution against the communist regime”, we read on ‘Euronews ‘.
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