The first time I talked to Dr. Katalin Karikó on the phone, it was late 2020. I knew that Karikó had helped create mRNA vaccines — the ones developed by pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer/BioNTech (where Karikó works) to fight the COVID-19 pandemic — and I expected to discuss science.
Instead, I unexpectedly found myself wishing I knew how to speak Hungarian.
Karikó, who along with Dr. Drew Weissman won a Nobel Prize in Medicine last week for their work in developing mRNA vaccines, began talking to me in the tongue of her native Hungary after I pronounced my surname, "Rozsa," in the traditional Hungarian ("Roe" plus "-zsa" as in Zsa Zsa Gabor.) Karikó responded by casually conversing with me in Magyar (the official name for the Hungarian language), putting me in the awkward predicament of confessing that I know not a word of the language spoken fluently by my immigrant grandfather.
Karikó was gracious about my ignorance, and I was grateful for her graciousness. After all, it is not every day that you converse with a scientist whose work saved millions of lives. Making her triumph even more notable, Karikó did this with ideas she developed while staunchly standing up to institutional opposition. Karikó is a real-life anti-establishment icon, the kind anti-vaxxers only pretend to be.
When the tale of the COVID-19 pandemic is chronicled by future historians, it'll have to start three decades before the viral SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, because that was how long Karikó advocated for mRNA vaccines. She spent much of the 1990s getting rejected in her efforts to obtain funding, eventually losing her path to a full professorship from the University of Pennsylvania (her employer at the time) and instead being demoted. Despite these setbacks, she and Weissman persevered in their research, and by 2013 Karikó had been hired by BioNTech.
"I want young people to feel — if my example, because I was demoted, rejected, terminated, I was even subject for deportation one point — [that] if they just pursue their thing, my example helps them to wear rejection as a badge," Karikó, now a senior vice president at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals, told me less than a year into the pandemic. "'Okay, well, I was rejected. I know Katalin was rejected and still [succeeded] at the end.' So if it helps them, then it helps them."
In some ways, Karikó reminds me of another great Hungarian scientist, Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1847, when maternal mortality rates were extremely high at a maternity ward run by doctors at a Vienna hospital, Semmelweis deduced that the physicians were inadvertently killing mothers and babies by refusing to wash their hands. Although his proposal caused the mortality rate to drop from above 18 percent to below 2 percent, Semmelweis was destroyed by a medical establishment that found his ideas objectionable for class reasons. (Like many free thinkers who opposed powerful establishments, Semmelweis was also described as difficult to work with.) Unlike Karikó, Semmelweis' career was destroyed; he never benefited from the vindication that he deserved during his own lifetime.
Yet the parallels between Karikó and Semmelweis are still strong enough to warrant mention, especially when you consider the persistence of the anti-vaxxer movement. Much of the misinformation today vilifies mRNA vaccines, particularly by exaggerating the risk of heart-related illnesses (heart-related complications from COVID-19 vaccines are extremely rare; heart-related complications from COVID-19 infections are not). Yet Karikó herself is the best teacher for those who are simply stumped by the science of how mRNA vaccines actually work.
"Vaccines containing killed viruses or viral proteins will only induce antibodies," Karikó told Salon in 2020, referring to how conventional vaccines operate. "Meanwhile, mRNA vaccines, in addition to antibodies, also induce cellular immune response because the encoded viral proteins are synthesized inside the cell of the vaccinated person." This means the mRNA injected makes one's body literally synthesize the same proteins that the virus will synthesize. In the case of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine, "it induced coronavirus-specific antibodies and T cells."
I appreciated interviewing Karikó in no small part because of her skill at taking complex science and making it accessible to non-scientists like me — even if she was unable to help me understand Magyar. Yet the other benefit of speaking with her was hearing her lesson on standing up for one's principles against institutions that — for whatever reason — are just plain wrong. Her observation to me on that subject could easily be an all-purpose rebellious free-thinker's mantra, one that can be applied to any cause.
"People that are in power, they can help you or block you," Karikó had told me. "And sometimes people select to make your life miserable." But if they cannot be happy for you after you succeed, "don't spend too much time on these things."
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.
