Who is Penn Nobel prize winner Katalin Karikó?
Penn scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman were named recipients of the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Katalin Karikó is one of two University of Pennsylvania scientists who on Monday shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for their discoveries about messenger RNA, the genetic foundation of the COVID-19 vaccine.
As an adjunct professor of neurosurgery at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, Karikó has spent decades researching medical uses for mRNA, molecules that carry protein-building instructions to cells.
» READ MORE: Penn mRNA scientists Karikó and Weissman win Nobel Prize
Karikó and Weissman in 2005 discovered how to modify mRNA to instruct cells to build proteins and activate the immune system against a virus.
The technique became widely known as the foundation for the COVID-19 vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech but holds promise for many other medical uses.
Karikó and Weissman won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for their work in 2021. In January, they were named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
A scientist’s path to Philadelphia
Karikó grew up in a small town in Hungary, where her father was a butcher and her mother worked as a bookkeeper. She earned an undergraduate degree in biology and a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Hungary’s University of Szeged.
She came to Philadelphia in 1985 for a job at Temple University. She told The Inquirer she stashed extra cash for the journey in her daughter’s teddy bear because the Hungarian government allowed the family to emigrate with no more than $100.
Karikó later worked at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., and came to Penn in 1989.
Karikó's daughter, Susan Francia, is a two-time Olympic gold medalist in rowing.
In a column for ESPN, Francia described her mother’s perseverance and dedication to her work: She sometimes slept under her lab desk in Maryland, rather than commuting home to Philadelphia; she struggled to find grants and, at one point, was demoted, Francia wrote.
She recalled how her mother celebrated successful clinical results for the COVID-19 vaccine.
“No splurges or fancy dinners or anything flashy,” Francia wrote. “Instead, she ate a whole box of Goobers, the chocolate-covered peanuts, all by herself at her desk.”