Katalin Kariko

Katalin Karikó
Born	Karikó Katalin 17 1, 1955
Birthplace	Szolnok, Hungary
Nationality	Hungarian, American
Occupation	Biochemist, researcher
Known for	Pioneering research on mRNA therapeutics, contributions to COVID-19 vaccine development
Education	PhD, University of Szeged
Awards	Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2023), Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2022), Lasker–DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (2021)

Katalin Karikó (Template:IPA-hu; born January 17, 1955) is a Hungarian-born American biochemist whose decades-long research into messenger RNA (mRNA) technology laid the scientific groundwork for the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. Born in the small Hungarian city of Szolnok during the Cold War era, Karikó spent much of her career working in relative obscurity, enduring repeated grant rejections, academic demotions, and professional marginalization before her foundational discoveries were recognized as among the most consequential contributions to modern medicine. Her work, particularly on nucleoside modifications to mRNA that allow synthetic mRNA to evade the human immune system's inflammatory response, became the basis for the Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna vaccines that were administered to billions of people worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, Karikó was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, jointly with her long-time collaborator Drew Weissman, for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines. Her story has become emblematic of the long, uncertain path that fundamental scientific research often takes before yielding transformative applications.

Early Life

Katalin Karikó was born on January 17, 1955, in Szolnok, a city in central Hungary situated along the Tisza River. She grew up in modest circumstances in the town of Kisújszállás, where her father worked as a butcher. Hungary was under communist rule at the time, and the family lived without running water or a refrigerator in their home. Despite these humble beginnings, Karikó developed an early interest in science, an inclination nurtured in part by her educational experiences in the Hungarian school system.

Karikó has spoken in interviews about how her upbringing instilled in her a resilience and work ethic that would prove essential during the many years of professional setbacks she would later endure. Growing up in a small town behind the Iron Curtain, she had limited access to the kinds of research infrastructure available in Western countries, yet she pursued her scientific ambitions with determination from an early age.

Her early life in Hungary shaped both her scientific curiosity and her understanding of the value of persistence. The experience of growing up in a resource-limited environment, where improvisation and determination were necessary to accomplish even basic goals, became a defining characteristic of her approach to research throughout her career.

Education

Karikó pursued her higher education at the University of Szeged (formerly known as the József Attila University, or JATE), one of Hungary's most prominent research universities. She earned her PhD in biochemistry from the institution, where she began her early research into RNA biology and lipid-mediated gene delivery systems. The University of Szeged would remain an important institution in Karikó's life; decades later, she established the JATE Awards in honor of her alma mater to recognize academic achievement.

After completing her doctoral work in Hungary, Karikó conducted postdoctoral research at the Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged, where she continued to focus on RNA research. It was during this period that she began to develop a deep conviction about the therapeutic potential of mRNA — a conviction that would guide her work for the next four decades.

Career

Move to the United States and Early Career

In 1985, Karikó left Hungary for the United States with her husband and young daughter, Susan Francia. The family's departure was shaped by the political and economic constraints of Cold War-era Hungary. According to widely reported accounts, the family sold their car — a Fiat — and smuggled the proceeds, approximately 900 British pounds, inside their daughter's teddy bear to fund their emigration. They settled in Philadelphia, where Karikó took a postdoctoral position at Temple University.

Karikó subsequently held research positions at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. At Penn, she worked as a research assistant professor, a non-tenure-track position that offered limited job security and required her to continually secure external grant funding to maintain her laboratory and her position.

Decades of Rejection and Perseverance

Karikó's time at the University of Pennsylvania was marked by persistent professional difficulties. She was deeply committed to the idea that synthetic mRNA could be used as a therapeutic tool — that it could be introduced into cells to instruct them to produce specific proteins, potentially treating a wide range of diseases. However, this idea was considered fringe by much of the scientific establishment during the 1990s and early 2000s. The prevailing view was that mRNA was too unstable, too difficult to work with, and too likely to provoke dangerous inflammatory immune responses to be useful as a drug or vaccine platform.

As a result, Karikó's grant applications were repeatedly rejected. She applied for funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other major grant-making bodies numerous times, and was turned down again and again. Without sufficient grant funding, her position at the university became precarious. In 1995, the University of Pennsylvania demoted her from her position on the tenure track, a devastating professional blow that might have ended many researchers' careers. Rather than leave academia or abandon her research focus, Karikó accepted the demotion and continued her work on mRNA.

Karikó has described this period as one of profound professional isolation. In a 2025 interview with Science Friday, she recalled, "I was considered a nobody," reflecting on how her colleagues and the broader scientific community dismissed both her and her research area. A 2026 article in The Washington Post included Karikó among a group of scientists throughout history who were "ridiculed, exiled, and imprisoned for being right," noting that her experience of being marginalized for decades before being vindicated represents a recurring pattern in the history of scientific discovery.

Despite these setbacks, Karikó persisted. She continued to conduct experiments on mRNA, often working with minimal resources and limited institutional support. Her persistence during this period, lasting roughly from the late 1980s through the mid-2000s — approximately 30 years — has become one of the most frequently cited aspects of her biography and is often held up as an example of the importance of funding basic, curiosity-driven research even when its practical applications are not immediately apparent.

Breakthrough Discovery with Drew Weissman

The turning point in Karikó's career came through a chance encounter at the University of Pennsylvania. In the late 1990s, she met Drew Weissman, an immunologist who had trained at the NIH under Anthony Fauci. Weissman was interested in developing an HIV vaccine and was intrigued by the potential of mRNA technology. The two began a collaboration that would prove transformative for both their careers and for the field of medicine.

The central problem Karikó and Weissman sought to solve was the inflammatory immune response triggered by synthetic mRNA when introduced into the body. The human immune system recognizes foreign mRNA as a potential threat — much as it would recognize a viral infection — and mounts an inflammatory response that can be dangerous and that also degrades the mRNA before it can perform its intended therapeutic function.

Through a series of experiments, Karikó and Weissman discovered that by modifying specific nucleosides — the building blocks of RNA — they could create synthetic mRNA that evaded the body's innate immune defenses. Specifically, they found that replacing the nucleoside uridine with pseudouridine allowed the mRNA to slip past the immune system's toll-like receptors without triggering inflammation. This discovery, published in a landmark 2005 paper, was the foundational breakthrough that made mRNA therapeutics and vaccines practically feasible.

At the time, the 2005 paper received relatively modest attention from the broader scientific community. It was not immediately recognized as the groundbreaking advance it would later prove to be. However, a small number of researchers and entrepreneurs took notice, and the discovery gradually began to attract interest from the nascent mRNA therapeutics industry.

Work with BioNTech and mRNA Vaccine Development

Karikó's research eventually attracted the attention of BioNTech, a German biotechnology company founded in 2008 by Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci. BioNTech was dedicated to developing mRNA-based therapies, initially with a focus on cancer immunotherapies. In 2013, Karikó joined BioNTech as a senior vice president, a move that reflected both the company's recognition of her expertise and her own desire to see her research translated into real-world medical applications. She later served as a senior vice president at the company.

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020, the nucleoside modification technology that Karikó and Weissman had developed became the key enabling technology for the rapid development of mRNA vaccines. BioNTech partnered with Pfizer to develop what became known as the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (marketed as Comirnaty), which received emergency use authorization in December 2020 — less than a year after the SARS-CoV-2 virus was first sequenced. Moderna, another biotechnology company that had licensed nucleoside modification technology, independently developed its own mRNA vaccine on a similar timeline.

The Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were administered to billions of people worldwide and are credited with preventing millions of deaths during the pandemic. The speed with which these vaccines were developed — a process that typically takes a decade or more compressed into less than a year — was made possible in large part by the foundational work Karikó and Weissman had conducted over the preceding decades.

Advocacy for Basic Research and mRNA's Future Applications

Following the success of the COVID-19 vaccines, Karikó has been an outspoken advocate for continued investment in basic scientific research. In a 2025 interview with Medscape, she discussed the future of RNA-based therapies beyond COVID-19, highlighting potential applications in cancer treatment, autoimmune diseases, and other conditions. She emphasized that continued basic research is essential for realizing the full potential of mRNA technology.

In August 2025, Karikó publicly criticized the decision by U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to pull research funding for mRNA vaccine technology, comparing the decision to "dropping a bomb" on the scientific infrastructure that had enabled the COVID-19 vaccine response. Her comments, published in The Times, reflected her broader concern about the political vulnerability of scientific research funding and the potential consequences of defunding technologies that had proven their value during the pandemic.

Personal Life

Karikó emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1985 with her husband, Béla Francia, and their daughter, Susan Francia. The family settled in the Philadelphia area, where Karikó built her career at the University of Pennsylvania. Susan Francia went on to become a competitive rower, winning two Olympic gold medals for the United States in rowing at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics.

Karikó holds both Hungarian and American citizenship. Despite spending most of her professional life in the United States, she has maintained strong ties to Hungary and to her alma mater, the University of Szeged. In November 2025, she established the JATE Awards, named after the former designation of the University of Szeged (József Attila Tudományegyetem), to recognize academic excellence. The inaugural awards were presented at a gala ceremony at the university.

In May 2025, a new exhibition titled Forever Forward opened at the Josephinum Museum in Vienna, Austria, celebrating Karikó's life and scientific contributions. The exhibition documented her journey from a small town in Hungary to the Nobel Prize, highlighting both her scientific achievements and the personal resilience that characterized her career.

Recognition

Karikó's contributions to science went largely unrecognized for decades, but beginning in the early 2020s, she received a rapid succession of major awards and honors reflecting the significance of her work.

In 2021, Karikó and Weissman received the Lasker–DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, one of the most prestigious honors in American medicine, often referred to as "America's Nobel." The award recognized their discovery of nucleoside modifications to mRNA that suppressed innate immune responses and enabled the development of mRNA therapeutics and vaccines.

In 2022, Karikó and Weissman were awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, which carries a monetary award of $3 million and is among the largest scientific prizes in the world.

In October 2023, Karikó and Weissman were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19." Karikó became one of only a small number of women to receive the Nobel Prize in this category. The Nobel Committee noted that their discoveries were "critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020."

The recognition Karikó received stood in stark contrast to the decades she spent in professional obscurity. Her story became a prominent example in public discussions about the importance of funding basic research, the failures of the academic grant system, and the tendency of institutions to undervalue researchers working on problems whose practical applications are not yet apparent. A 2026 opinion piece in The Washington Post placed Karikó alongside historical figures such as Galileo among scientists who endured professional persecution before their contributions were vindicated.

Legacy

Karikó's legacy extends across multiple dimensions: as a scientist whose fundamental discoveries enabled a new class of medical therapeutics, as a figure whose career trajectory exposed systemic problems in academic research funding, and as a symbol of perseverance in the face of professional adversity.

The mRNA technology that Karikó helped develop has applications that extend far beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Researchers around the world are now exploring the use of mRNA-based therapies for cancer, infectious diseases beyond COVID-19, autoimmune disorders, rare genetic diseases, and other conditions. In her 2025 Medscape interview, Karikó discussed these future applications, noting that the fundamental platform she helped create could potentially be adapted to address a wide range of medical conditions that are currently difficult or impossible to treat.

Karikó's career story has also had a significant impact on discussions about science policy and research funding. Her experience of spending decades without adequate grant funding, being demoted by her institution, and being dismissed by colleagues — only to later produce work that proved essential during a global health crisis — has been cited by advocates for reforming the academic grant system. Critics of the current system argue that Karikó's experience demonstrates how the emphasis on short-term, results-oriented funding can marginalize precisely the kind of long-term, curiosity-driven research that produces the most transformative breakthroughs.

Her advocacy for continued investment in mRNA research has taken on additional urgency in the context of political debates over vaccine funding in the United States. Her 2025 public statements criticizing the withdrawal of research funding for mRNA technology reflected her concern that political decisions could undermine the scientific infrastructure that enabled the rapid vaccine response to COVID-19.

Through the establishment of the JATE Awards at the University of Szeged, Karikó has also sought to support the next generation of researchers, particularly in Hungary, ensuring that her legacy extends beyond her own scientific contributions to the broader cultivation of scientific talent.

Karikó's life and work have been the subject of exhibitions, books, media profiles, and documentary treatments. The Forever Forward exhibition in Vienna in 2025 represented one of the most comprehensive public presentations of her biography and scientific legacy. Her story continues to be invoked in discussions about the nature of scientific progress, the role of persistence in discovery, and the societal value of supporting researchers whose work may not yield immediate results but whose contributions can prove essential when the world faces unexpected challenges.