11/01/2026
Katalin Karikó fled her country with $1,200 hidden in a teddy bear.
She was thirty years old, had a PhD in biochemistry, and believed in an idea almost no one else did.
Messenger RNA could teach human cells how to fight disease.
She had no idea it would take forty years for the world to listen.
In 1985, Karikó, her husband, and their two-year-old daughter escaped communist Hungary and boarded a plane to America. They sold their Russian-made Lada on the black market. That money—their entire savings—was sewn inside Susan's teddy bear because Hungary only allowed families to leave with $100.
They arrived in Philadelphia with no safety net. Karikó had secured a postdoctoral position at Temple University, but the starting salary was $17,000 a year. Four people, including her mother who joined them later, lived on that amount.
Then her career nearly ended before it began.
After clashing with her supervisor, Robert Suhadolnik, she was reported to immigration authorities and had to hire a lawyer to avoid deportation. A promised job offer from Johns Hopkins disappeared. Suhadolnik "continued bad-mouthing Karikó, making it impossible for her to get a new position" at other institutions.
Still, she persisted.
At the University of Pennsylvania, where she started in 1989, she continued working on mRNA. No one wanted it. Grant applications were rejected again and again. In science, without grants, you effectively do not exist. RNA was considered unstable, unreliable, a dead end. When Karikó insisted the problem was technique, not the molecule, she was ignored.
In January 1995, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Soon after, her husband was trapped in Hungary for six months because of visa complications.
At the same time, the University of Pennsylvania gave her an ultimatum: Abandon mRNA or accept a demotion off the tenure track.
She accepted the demotion.
Her salary fell below that of the lab technicians she worked with. Over the next 18 years, as health insurance and parking costs rose, her salary barely changed. She was making less in real terms every year.
She considered leaving science entirely. But something kept her going.
Then, in 1997, she met Drew Weissman at a photocopier.
They were both printing journal articles. Karikó told Weissman she could make any mRNA. He was intrigued. He'd been trying to develop an HIV vaccine and was frustrated with DNA-based approaches.
They began collaborating in near invisibility. No prestige. No funding. Even Weissman struggled—it would take him 10 years to secure his first NIH grant for mRNA research. Anthony Fauci, his former mentor, asked him, "Why are you wasting your time? Why don't you do something with potential impact?"
But they persisted.
In 2005, they discovered how to modify mRNA so it would not trigger a destructive immune response. By substituting one nucleoside with another, they could slip mRNA past the body's defenses. It was the missing key that made mRNA therapeutics possible.
They submitted their paper to Nature and Science, the most prestigious journals in science.
Both rejected it. Nature dismissed it as an "incremental contribution."
The paper was published quietly in the journal Immunity. Almost no one noticed.
Karikó and Weissman kept working. They founded a small company, RNARx, and filed patents. The University of Pennsylvania sold the intellectual property license to a lab supply company. Weeks later, when Moderna's parent company tried to license the patent, Karikó had to tell them it was no longer available.
Still, her work went unrecognized.
In 2013, the University of Pennsylvania pushed Karikó out. "I was kicked out from UPenn, was forced to retire," she later told the Nobel Prize organization. UPenn told her she was "not of faculty quality."
At fifty-eight, she took a job at a small German biotech company called BioNTech.
Her colleagues at Penn laughed at her. "BioNTech doesn't even have a website," they said.
She went anyway.
Then came 2020.
COVID-19 spread across the world. Within months, the technology that had been dismissed for decades became the foundation of the fastest vaccine development in history.
BioNTech partnered with Pfizer. Moderna used Karikó and Weissman's modifications. By December 2020, mRNA vaccines were being administered to millions.
The vaccines demonstrated over 90% efficacy. They saved millions of lives.
On October 2, 2023, Karikó received a call at 3:40 a.m. No number showed on the screen. The person on the line told her she'd won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
She thought it was a prank.
It wasn't. She and Drew Weissman had been awarded the Nobel Prize "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19."
The University of Pennsylvania immediately celebrated on social media, posting about "Penn's historic mRNA vaccine research team." Twitter marked the posts as "misleading" because Karikó hadn't been affiliated with UPenn for a decade—and had been forced out after being told she wasn't faculty quality.
At the press conference, Karikó joked that Penn should invest in more copy machines "so researchers have the opportunity to stand around, chitchat, and share their ideas."
Her daughter Susan, who crossed the Atlantic in 1985 clutching a teddy bear full of money, became a two-time Olympic gold medalist for the United States in rowing.
Karikó still has the teddy bear.
She was never promoted at Penn. Never celebrated early. Never believed in because she was praised.
She believed because the science mattered.
And forty years later, when the world needed it most, it was ready.
