The Nobel laureate, whose work contributed to the rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine in 2020, told the Nobel organization that despite being frustrated and ultimately “kicked out” of the Ivy League school where she worked Still achieved his goal.
BioNTech’s current vice president Katalin Karikó and her Penn colleague Drew Weissman won this year’s Nobel Prize physiology or medicine For research on messenger RNA or mRNA. The Nobel Foundation announced on Monday that their work was “crucial” for the rapid development of the first coronavirus vaccines in 2020.
Karikó began studying mRNA, the “translator” that converts the DNA instructions that make up the human genetic code into the proteins that cells produce to make the body work. “I’ve always believed that most patients don’t actually need new genes, they need something temporary, like a drug, to cure their pain,” she said Tell Wired 2020.
Shortly after Carrico received her PhD in 1982, she began to be rejected and prepared to leave her native Hungary. After several European labs told her there was no room for her here, Carrico, her husband and their 2-year-old daughter secretly left communist Hungary in 1985, smuggling 900 pounds sewn into their daughter Tay’s body. Something on Di Xiong.Carrico got a job at Temple University in Philadelphia, but after four years, she It is said Fall out with your boss, get kicked out of college, and risk deportation. As she continued her research at nearby Penn State, Karikó encountered failure after failure—her cells kept dying after receiving injections of modified mRNA, and she didn’t understand why.
In 1995, Penn State bosses gave Carrico an ultimatum: Give up her research or face a demotion and a pay cut. She told Carrico that Carrico received the directive while her husband was stuck in Hungary for six months due to visa issues, the same week she was diagnosed with cancer. wired.
She told us it was “terrible” statistical news 2020. “I wanted to go somewhere else or do something else,” she said, adding, “I also thought maybe I wasn’t good enough or smart enough.”
Her new role takes her out of tenure — a major goal of any academic career — and makes her pay less than a lab technician, Wired reports. In 2013, she was expelled from the Ivy League school school for good”, she told Adam Smith, head of science promotion at the Nobel Foundation, in an interview. Monday interview.
“I was kicked out of Penn State—I was forced to retire,” she said.
Representatives from Penn State did not respond to requests for comment, although the university listed her as an adjunct professor as early as 2020. Press release Research on Carrico and Weisman.
‘I’m not even a professor‘
She told Smith what keeps Carrico going is working with Weisman. Weisman was a Penn State professor she met by chance while fighting for a photocopier. Her husband’s support was also crucial during the nine years she spent “traveling back and forth to Germany” to work at BioNTech, she said.
Karikó, 58, “did all these experiments with my own hands…I’m still growing plasmids and feeding cells,” she told Smith. Her late mother would often suggest that Chestnut win a Nobel Prize, and the scientist would laugh and say, “I’m not even a professor, there’s no team.”
A breakthrough finally came in 2005, when Kurikó and Weiddman published research showing how to modify mRNA in a way that did not trigger cell death, allowing the technology to be used in vaccines and other types of therapies.
The Nobel Foundation wrote that this marked a “paradigm change,” praising Karikó for “persevering in her vision of realizing mRNA as a therapeutic despite the difficulties she encountered in convincing research funders of the importance of her project.” (Penn still holds a patent on the duo’s research, local radio station Why report.)
Smith said the experience pointed to an age-old lesson, “The message of it all is that persistence will pay off in the end.” The scientist agreed: “You have to keep at it,” she said.
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