Katalin Karik贸 (Bodley Head (UK); Crown (US))
IN OCTOBER 2023, the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine went to Katalin Karik贸 for helping to lay the groundwork for mRNA-based covid-19 vaccines, alongside her collaborator, Drew Weissman. Yet only a few years earlier, Karik贸鈥檚 career had been spoken of 鈥渋n hushed tones as a cautionary tale for young scientists鈥�.
Karik贸鈥檚 story is a classic in the genre of underdogs succeeding against the odds. In her autobiography, Breaking Through: My life in science, she dishes the dirt on those who overlooked and underestimated her for decades, particularly staff at her chief workplace, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
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In the 1980s, Karik贸 had recently emigrated to the US from Hungary and was struggling with a very different workplace culture, having scored a job at the prestigious 鈥淧enn鈥�. She had spotted the promise of mRNA, a molecule that cells use to make proteins from the information stored in their DNA. While mRNA was infamously unstable and difficult to work with, it could, in theory, be used to make cells produce any proteins you like.
But Karik贸 couldn鈥檛 convince the usual funding sources, such as the US government, to give her grants to discover how to harness this resource. After five years without securing a grant, Karik贸 was demoted from the academic career ladder.
Anyone who had previously suffered this fate had left Penn, but Karik贸 carried on in a low-status position, scrabbling around for laboratory reagents. She even made her own lab flasks from oversized pickle jars.
There were bright spots. A few individuals gave her help and encouragement. After a chance encounter at a photocopier, Karik贸 struck up a partnership with Weissman, then an HIV vaccine researcher, and switched her focus from mRNA-based medicines to vaccines. Together, they made a key breakthrough, discovering how to modify artificial mRNA so it is accepted by our cells without a destructive immune response.
The technology was licensed by two small biotech firms: Moderna, based in the US, and BioNTech in Germany, where Karik贸 took a job. When covid-19 struck, mRNA was an obvious choice for vaccines because new mRNA molecules can be designed and mass produced faster than the components of most other kinds of vaccine. The rest is pandemic history.
But it is sobering to consider how close we came to not having that technology. Why was it such a near miss? An autobiography is necessarily a one-sided account, but Karik贸 is scathing about the workplace culture at Penn, where, in her view, self-publicity and sycophancy seemed essential career skills and who you knew beat what you knew.
Yet wider issues may also have come into it. Perhaps the current grant-awarding system is too focused on applied research 鈥� which seeks to answer specific questions with fast pay-offs 鈥� rather than basic science, which explores deeper questions in the hope a use will turn up sometime.
There is a more fundamental problem with how universities are run, though. Scientists are judged mercilessly by metrics such as the number of papers they have published, the prestige of the journals in which these appear and their impact 鈥� how many times their papers are cited by others.
Such an approach may keep bean counters happy, but can be gamed by the unscrupulous and may not gauge a scientist鈥檚 true abilities. Karik贸 wasn鈥檛 valued at Penn because she scored zero on its dollars-per-square-foot scale, a measure of how much grant money a scientist brings in compared with their lab space.
The key question is how we can change the system to ensure we don鈥檛 overlook people like Karik贸, according to at the Good Science Project, which aims to improve the funding system.
Considering how many lives have been saved by the mRNA covid-19 vaccines, it turns out that Karik贸鈥檚 story is a cautionary tale 鈥� just not the one that her university thought it was.
