Katalin Karikó:
The Freedom of the Periphery

“I am in the periphery, where there is no respect and no money, but I have the freedom to do what I think is important.”
Katalin Karikó

Her colleagues felt sorry for her, but they failed to dissuade her from forty years on RNA, a molecule that disintegrated in every researcher’s hand. It was unfashionable, unsexy and unfunded. Katalin Karikó ran into more closed doors than most, having arrived from Hungary in 1985 with a two-year-old and the money from their car hidden in a teddy bear, and was never discouraged. She had the freedom of being barely visible in the laboratory. She had fun there, and she found her purpose.

Her path is unique in that she never wavered where others would have given up long ago. Was it the modest upbringing in post-war communist Hungary? The parents who instilled a work ethos in her early? Or the fact that, as an immigrant in the United States, her options were narrow? A woman with a fierce sense of where her journey should take her, incorruptible by luxury or status, made a discovery that opened a new pathway for vaccines and for therapies in general, and led the way to the largest vaccination campaign in human history.

In this conversation she answers the fears directly. Whether mRNA can reach your DNA. Where “turbo cancer” comes from, and what a lump that swells days after a vaccination actually means. “It accelerates detection,” she says.

She is hard on Europe and its scientists, who prefer a safe post to the risk of betting on their own research, and questions her own profession’s failure to explain itself rather than blaming the politicians now cutting American science.

Opposition did not slow her, it set her pace. She is devoid of self-pity, unassuming and unimpressed by her own myth, and her mind is already firmly set on the next discovery and therapy. And she may surprise the world yet again.

Statements on health and medicine in this interview are the personal views of the guest. They are not medical advice. For questions about your own health, please consult your doctor.

Katalin Karikó, “Breaking Through: My Life in Science”, written with Ali Benjamin, published in the United States by Crown, 2023.