IIn May 2013, Katalin Karikó came to work in her laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania to find her things piled up in the hallway. “There were my folders, my posters, my boxes of test tubes,” she remembers. Nearby, a lab technician was shoving things into a trash can. “My stuff!” Karikó realized it.
Despite working in the small laboratory for years, the scientist – then in her 50s – was excluded without notice because she had failed to bring in “sufficient dollars per net square meter.” In short, it had not secured enough subsidies to justify the meager space it occupied.
“That laboratory will become a museum one day,” Karikó hissed at the manager who had dropped her. These were strange but prophetic words, as made clear in this compelling and moving story of the travails of a scientist now recognized as one of the world’s greatest biochemists, a woman who helped create the vaccines that have helped millions rescued during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Karikó comes from a humble background in central Hungary and grew up in a one-room house that was heated by a lone stove in winter and had no running water. Her father was forced to work as a laborer when he was fired from his job as a master butcher after running afoul of local Communist Party officials.
It was a hard life, but a loving life Breaking through reveals. Her family was close and the state at least encouraged education. And Karikó was a worker. “I don’t consider myself particularly smart, but what I lacked in natural skills I could make up for with effort,” she says.
She took summer physics classes, became a biology student at the University of Szeged and eventually received her PhD there. At the age of 22, she fell in love with Béla Francia, an apprentice mechanic five years her junior. They married and in 1982 Karikó gave birth to their daughter Susan. Two years later they moved to the US with all their savings – about £900 – sewn into Susan’s teddy bear to avoid Hungary’s currency restrictions.
By then, Karikó had become obsessed with messenger RNA (mRNA), the material responsible for translating our DNA into proteins, the molecules that make us up. Crucially, mRNA is extremely difficult to work with because it is fragile and short-lived. But Karikó was convinced that it could play an important role in medicine and continuously fought for it to become a research focus. Few colleagues agreed, calling her “the crazy mRNA lady.”
However, such swear words were a minor headache. At Temple University in Philadelphia, where she began her work in the US, her supervisor, Robert Suhadolnik – after initially being supportive – tried to have her deported for daring to take a job at another university to search.
She eventually moved to the University of Pennsylvania. Again, things went well at first, but as she continued her mRNA obsession, the university began to criticize her inability to attract grants. She was demoted, denied tenure, took a pay cut, and ultimately found her belongings dumped in a hallway.
Fortunately for Karikó – and the rest of the world – her obsession with mRNA was now shared by several other scientists and she was picked up by the German company BioNTech to work on mRNA medicines.
The rest is scientific history. When Covid-19 hit, BioNTech and Karikó realized they were in a great position to tackle the pandemic, and with the backing of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, they developed a vaccine that played a key role in helping protect the planet against the worst vicissitudes of the world. coronavirus.
How this success affected Karikó is explained in one of the most moving moments in Breaking through. She returned to Penn to receive one of the first Covid shots administered in the US. Karikó was spotted in the crowd and, as the inventor of vaccines, she was greeted with approving cheers. “My eyes got misty,” she remembers.
This is a vividly written, compelling memoir of a life of triumph (including her daughter Susan’s successes as an Olympic gold medal-winning rower) over near-constant setbacks. However, the precise reasons for the continued undermining of her research and academic prestige remain open Breaking through This suggests that science today is suffering because it requires its practitioners to publish articles by volume rather than by merit, and to seek grants for safe research, as opposed to risky but potentially groundbreaking work. Quantity, not quality, has become a career driver.
Ironically, the last laugh is missing for Karikó Breaking through. Together with Drew Weissman, she won the Nobel Prize for physiology in October 2023 – too late for inclusion in her book. What those who thwarted her research must think about this eventual success can only be guessed. However, one thing is clear. Her old laboratory may not be a museum yet, but one day it will be.