Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian-born biochemist, dedicated her life’s work to messenger RNA (mRNA), which she always believed had the potential to change the world. After decades of being ignored, she persisted with the research that eventually revolutionized the field of medicine and enabled the development of lifesaving vaccines in record time during the COVID pandemic. Karikó tells her story in her memoir Breaking Through: My Life in Science, sharing her journey from young researcher in Hungary to Nobel Prize–winning biochemist.
In this conversation, she reflects on the challenges and breakthroughs that defined her career, her resilience and the scientific curiosity that fueled her passion for mRNA research.
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TRANSCRIPT
Announcer: I invite you now to step forward to receive the Nobel Prize from the hands of His Majesty the King.
Announcer: And first to receive the medicine prize is Katalin Karikó, born in Hungary, affiliated to Szeged University in Hungary and University of Pennsylvania in the United States.
Deborah Unger: Welcome to this latest episode in our series, “Lost Women of Science Conversations,” where we talk about authors and artists who’ve discovered and celebrated female scientists in books, poetry, film, theater, and the visual arts. My name is Deborah Unger, and I am a Senior Managing Editor at “Lost Women of Science.” Today, we’re going to do something a bit different. In all our conversations so far, we’ve talked about people in the pastforgotten female scientists from the 19th and 20th centuries who are no longer with us.
Our subject today is very much with us. That clip at the beginning is from the Nobel Prize Ceremony in 2023, but Dr. Katalin Karikó was essentially forgotten for almost her entire career. That is until she shared the Nobel Prize with her colleague Dr. Drew Weissman. Now everyone knows her as the COVID vaccine lady, even if they don’t quite recall her name.
Her science made the production of a COVID vaccine possible in record time. And it was because she spent her whole life working on something that nobody thought was worthwhile. She writes about this in her memoir, “Breaking Through: My Life in Science.”
It’s a story…
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