Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The 646 people who have won Nobel science prizes include many who faced formidable obstacles. But few have overcome adversity like Katalin Karikó, co-winner of the 2023 award for medicine, whose discoveries led to the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines that saved millions of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This remarkable memoir begins on the plains of central Hungary, where the Karikó family lived in a single room heated by a sawdust stove, and ends with her being feted at grand events around the world. Breaking Through is a joy to read, written in a direct style that revels in personal details while explaining clearly the science behind Karikó’s research, particularly her fight — over more than 30 years — to prove that mRNA could play an important role in medicine.
mRNA is a shortlived biochemical messenger that translates the genetic code of DNA into proteins, the working molecules of life. The challenge, which Karikó helped overcome with her fellow Nobel laureate Drew Weissman, was twofold. First they had to modify evanescent mRNA into a synthetic form that would live long enough in the body to make therapeutically effective new proteins. Then they had to stop it triggering a severe reaction by the recipient’s immune system, leading to dangerous inflammation.
Karikó had grown up in an impoverished rural family. In 1957, two years after she was born, her father became a political pariah for agitating against the Communist party. A butcher, he lost his job at the local farming collective and had to work as a day labourer. Occasionally Karikó suffered adverse consequences, but her background had educational advantages too. As the child of a labourer, she was granted an F for fizikai (“physical worker”) in the register, which “meant in Communist Hungary that educators paid a little bit of extra attention to me”. This enabled her to attend summer science classes at high school, which in turned helped to gain admission to the University of Szeged to study biology, where she remained for her PhD.
As a 22-year-old, Karikó fell in love with 17-year-old Béla Francia, who was training to be a mechanic. Their courtship and subsequent marriage provide a happy romantic thread through the book. Another heartwarming strand is her positive relationship with daughter Susan, born in 1982, three years before Karikó left Hungary to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University in Philadelphia. With her mother’s enthusiastic encouragement, Susan later won gold medals with the US rowing team at the Beijing and London Olympics.
Karikó’s career, however, is a story of snakes and ladders. The first snake was the late Robert Suhadolnik, who had invited her to join his biochemistry team at Temple. He could be an encouraging, even inspiring boss, but was also a temper-driven tyrant. When Karikó was offered a job at Johns Hopkins University, an enraged Suhadolnik sabotaged the move and reported her to the US immigration authorities for visa violation. But she managed to avoid deportation and found positions at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences outside Washington DC, then at the University of Pennsylvania.
Even at Penn she was consistently refused tenure-track status, and failed to attract significant external funding. Many colleagues saw her, she writes, as “that crazy mRNA lady”. But the research made good progress, particularly after one day she struck up a conversation at the lab photocopier with the immunologist Drew Weissman. The pair started collaborating on a project that led to a groundbreaking 2005 paper showing how to manipulate mRNA to avoid the unwanted immune reaction in the human body.
In 2013, however, the university literally chucked Karikó out of her lab because she had still not gathered significant external grants. “I found my belongings in the hallway,” she writes. “There was my rolling chair, there were my binders, my hot plate, my posters, my boxes of test tubes . . .”
Ironically, her expulsion came just as the biotech industry was beginning to appreciate the commercial potential of mRNA. BioNTech, the German company that was to collaborate with pharmaceuticals group Pfizer on developing a Covid vaccine, quickly recruited Karikó as research vice-president. She describes the pleasure in leading a scientific team for the first time: “I no longer did every experiment myself”. Then came the excitement of responding to the pandemic.
Now Karikó is happy to savour life as a scientific celebrity “just a while longer”. But she also has an eye on young scientists, addressing them directly. “You must trust what’s inside you,” she writes. “Nurture what you find there, even — especially — when no one else does.”
Breaking Through: My Life in Science by Katalin Karikó, Bodley Head, £22, 336 pages
Clive Cookson is the FT’s senior science writer
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
