Katalin Karikó

Kisújszállás had no running water in the house she grew up in, no refrigerator and no television. Her father was a butcher, punished for taking part in the 1956 revolt. Her mother kept books. She placed third in Hungary in a national biology competition as a schoolgirl and took both her degrees at Szeged, a doctorate in biochemistry by 1982. From 1978 until 1985 the communist secret police listed her as an intelligence asset, which she says she was blackmailed into and never acted on. When her lab lost its funding in 1985 she took a postdoctoral job at Temple University in Philadelphia and left with her husband and their two-year-old daughter, £900 from selling the car stuffed into the child's teddy bear.

Temple went badly. When she accepted a job at Johns Hopkins in 1988 without telling her supervisor, he reported her to immigration and told her he would have her deported. Hopkins withdrew the offer while she fought the order. Penn hired her in 1989 to work on messenger RNA, and she stayed on it for the next 24 years while the field went out of fashion. The problem was that synthetic mRNA set off violent inflammation. With Drew Weissman, an immunologist who arrived at Penn in 1997, she worked out why, and how to stop it: swap uridine for pseudouridine. Nature turned the paper down. Science turned it down. Immunity published it in 2005. Fifteen years later, BioNTech and Moderna built COVID vaccines on it that ran above 90 percent effective.

Penn demoted her in 1995 after her grant applications kept failing. She had been on track for a full professorship. She never got tenure, and she stayed anyway, working on a molecule most of the field had written off. Penn sold the license to her and Weissman's modified-RNA patents to a lab supply company. Weeks later the venture firm behind Moderna called to ask about licensing it, and she had to tell them it was gone. In 2013, after Penn declined to reinstate her, she left for BioNTech, a German company with no product on the market. Her own university had spent 24 years underfunding the work it would later earn from.

On October 2, 2023, the Karolinska announced the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her and Weissman. Her memoir, Breaking Through, came out eight days later and became the best-selling nonfiction book in Hungary that year. In April 2024 she gave the prize money, more than half a million dollars, to the University of Szeged, where she had taken both her degrees and now teaches. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2025 and gave the commencement address at Johns Hopkins in May 2026, at the university that had once withdrawn a job offer under pressure from her old supervisor. She has collected more than 130 awards.

Katalin Karikó's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Suppression of RNA recognition by Toll-like receptors article
  Rejected by Nature and by Science, published in Immunity 2005
• Nucleoside-modified mRNA patents patent
  Held with Drew Weissman and later licensed to BioNTech and Moderna 2006
• RNARx company
  The company she and Weissman ran until 2013 2006
• Lipid nanoparticle delivery for mRNA discovery
  Packaging the fragile molecule in fat droplets so it survives the body 2008
• Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine invention
  Built on the modified-mRNA platform she and Weissman patented 2020
• Breaking Through: My Life in Science book
  Published eight days after the Nobel announcement, now in more than nine languages 2023

• 1982 aged ~27 Takes a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Szeged
• 1985 aged ~30 Leaves Hungary for Temple University with £900 hidden in a teddy bear Her lab in Szeged had lost its funding. The money came from selling the family car.
• 1988 aged ~33 Her supervisor reports her to immigration and Johns Hopkins withdraws its offer
• 1989 aged ~34 Joins the University of Pennsylvania to work on messenger RNA
• 1995 aged ~40 Penn demotes her after repeated grant rejections She had been on track for a full professorship. She stayed and kept working.
• 2005 aged ~50 She and Weissman publish the nucleoside-modification result in Immunity Nature and Science had both rejected it.
• 2013 aged ~58 Leaves Penn for BioNTech after the university declines to reinstate her
• October 2, 2023 aged 68 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Drew Weissman
• April 16, 2024 aged 69 Gives her Nobel money to the University of Szeged More than half a million dollars, back to the school that trained her.

• Drew Weissman b. 1959
  Immunologist whose collaboration with Katalin Karikó made mRNA vaccines practical and safe. shared the Nobel Prize with
• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. predecessor in vaccines
• Albert Sabin 1906–1993
  Medical researcher who developed the oral polio vaccine used in worldwide eradication campaigns. predecessor in vaccines
• Anthony Fauci b. 1940
  Physician-scientist who shaped federal responses to HIV/AIDS, emerging infections, and the COVID-19 pandemic. ran the federal response her vaccine ended
• James Watson 1928–2025
  Co-discoverer of the DNA double helix structure, earning a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. described the molecule she rewrote