The Scientist Nobody Would Fund

Katalin Karikó grew up in a small Hungarian town, in a two-room house without running water, the daughter of a butcher. She fell in love with biology, earned her doctorate, and went to work at the Biological Research Centre in Szeged — until 1985, when the underfunded lab let her go. She decided to try America. Hungary's currency rules allowed emigrants to take only a trivial sum abroad, so the family sold their car on the black market, exchanged the money for about nine hundred pounds sterling, and sewed the notes into their two-year-old daughter's teddy bear. She has told the story many times: everything they had crossed the border inside a child's toy.

Her obsession travelled with her. Messenger RNA — the molecule that carries DNA's instructions to a cell's protein factories — struck her as the most beautiful tool imaginable: if you could write your own message and deliver it, you could instruct the body to manufacture any protein you wanted. Any medicine. The body as its own factory. Almost nobody agreed. mRNA was notoriously unstable, absurd to work with, and worst of all it triggered violent inflammation when injected — the immune system attacked it as an invader. The field's verdict through the 1990s was settled: a dead end. DNA and gene therapy were the future; mRNA was a curiosity for the stubborn.

The system delivered its verdict on her accordingly. At the University of Pennsylvania, her grant applications were rejected one after another — she has said she never once won a major US federal grant for the mRNA work in those years. In 1995, instead of the expected promotion, the university demoted her off the professional track: no grants, no professorship, adjunct wages. In the same period, she has recounted, came a cancer scare and her husband stranded abroad by visa trouble. It was the moment careers end. She considered leaving; she stayed — for the simple, unreasonable reason that she believed the molecule worked and wanted to be at the bench.

The turning point arrived at a photocopier. In the late 1990s, queueing to copy journal articles, she fell into conversation with Drew Weissman, a newly arrived immunologist who had trained under Anthony Fauci and wanted a vaccine against HIV. She said — as she told it ever after — that she could make any mRNA; he studied the immune cells that mRNA enraged. Neither had money or attention to spare, which freed them to work on what mattered. Their question became the field's oldest objection: why does synthetic mRNA drive the immune system wild, when the body's own mRNA passes unmolested?

The answer, published in 2005, was almost insultingly elegant. Natural mRNA is not raw: its letters carry small chemical modifications, and those modifications are the password. Swap one letter — replace uridine with a naturally occurring variant, pseudouridine — and the immune system reads the molecule as "self" and lets it pass. Inflammation collapsed; protein production soared. The dead end had been a locked door, and they had found the key. The paper appeared — and the world shrugged. Little press, little funding, few citations at first. Karikó and Weissman patented the discovery and founded a small company; the university later sold the patent rights on terms that meant the discoverers never controlled their invention. For years, the key sat in the lock while almost nobody pushed the door.

Almost nobody — except two young companies betting everything on the molecule: Moderna in America, and BioNTech in Germany, founded by Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, a Turkish-German couple as obsessed with mRNA as Karikó herself. In 2013, aged fifty-eight, permanently unpromotable at Penn, she made her choice: she left the university that had demoted her and joined BioNTech as a senior vice-president — a company then so obscure, she later said, that it did not even have a website. Colleagues told her she was committing career suicide. It was, at last, the right laboratory.

In January 2020, a new coronavirus's genetic sequence was posted online by Chinese scientists. What followed compressed her forty years into eleven months. mRNA's great weakness had always been commercial — but its great strength was speed: to make a vaccine, you do not need to grow the virus at all, only to print its spike protein's instructions in mRNA and wrap them in fat droplets for delivery. BioNTech designed vaccine candidates within days and partnered with Pfizer; Moderna moved in parallel. The trials that autumn returned numbers nobody had dared forecast — roughly ninety-five per cent efficacy — and in December 2020, less than a year after the sequence appeared, the first mRNA vaccines in history went into arms. Billions of doses followed. Estimates published in medical journals credit the global vaccination effort with preventing deaths in the tens of millions in its first year; the mRNA platform, built on the 2005 modification, carried much of it.

The recognition arrived like a dam breaking — prize after prize, and in October 2023 the call from Stockholm: the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. The announcement's timing supplied the story's most quoted irony: the laureate had been demoted by her university, which now issued proud press releases; she has remarked that the same institution once considered her not of faculty quality. She heard the news, by her own account, exactly as she had spent the previous forty years — without ceremony. Her memoir's title states her whole method: Breaking Through.

She has spent her fame carefully — on one argument. The lesson of her life, she insists, is not that perseverance triumphs; for every vindicated Karikó there are thousands the system simply lost, and she nearly was one. The lesson is that the machinery of science — grants judged by fashion, careers judged by funding, prestige journals judged by trend — filters out precisely the unfashionable work from which platforms grow. The scientist survived the system; her point, made from every stage in the world, is that the system should not require survivors. What the next Karikó is working on right now, unfunded, in the wrong department, nobody knows — which is, she says, exactly the problem.