Research by the Hungarian-born scientist and her Nobel-winning partner, Drew Weissman, paved the way for the first COVID vaccines.
Katalin Karikó is swarmed by selfie-seeking “flash mob” at the University of Pennsylvania Monday when she and colleague Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine.Every year, Katalin Karikó met with her University of Pennsylvania department chair to update him on her quest to treat disease with messenger RNA — fragile, inflammatory genetic molecules that were so difficult to work with that most scientists thought it was a waste of time.
But in an autobiography that comes out Tuesday, Karikó describes years of struggle to get her ideas accepted by Penn colleagues and the broader scientific community. Even after 2005, when she and Weissman published“I was told that I was ‘not of faculty quality,’” she wrote, describing a conversation with an unnamed administrator at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.
Former Penn cardiologist Elliot Barnathan, who hired Karikó to work in his lab in 1989, said the buzz at the time was all about gene therapy, which sought toRNA, on the other hand, is a temporary copy of DNA that degrades easily, and most academics dismissedBarnathan rejected Karikó at first, too. When she sent in her application for a vacancy in his lab and did not hear back, she called his secretary to ask why.
In the book, Karikó acknowledges that she was a tough taskmaster. She described one such instance from when she first met Langer, back when he was a medical student at Penn. He and a classmate bungled one of the steps in preparing a batch of RNA, and Karikó scolded them and threw out their samples.Karikó also stood out because of her background.
“I was learning that succeeding at a research institution like Penn required skills that had little to do with science,” she wrote. “You needed to know how to do things in which I have never had any interest ”
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