At the bench. All the way.

Katalin Karikó joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 as a research assistant professor. Her subject was messenger RNA, the molecule that carries a cell's instructions for making proteins, and she was convinced it could be used as medicine. The grant reviewers were not. By 1995 the rejections had put her job at risk, and she accepted a demotion so she could stay and keep working.

In 1997 she met the immunologist Drew Weissman at Penn. Together they took on a stubborn problem: mRNA made in the lab set off the body's immune alarms and caused inflammation.

In August 2005 they published a paper in the journal Immunity showing that swapping in modified building blocks, among them one called pseudouridine, sharply reduced that reaction. It was a quiet result in a specialist journal.

Karikó kept going. In 2013 she joined BioNTech. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, the modified mRNA she and Weissman had worked out became a foundation of the mRNA vaccines. On 2 October 2023, the two of them were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

What kept her there

The story is usually told as persistence against rejection. When she talks about those years herself, she doesn't describe a sacrifice.

I have to say that I was always very happy. In the laboratory, I was at the bench. All the way.

Katalin Karikó, interview with Joe Walker, 2023

And about the prize that came so late: "So this fight for recognition was never in me," she told the Nobel Prize podcast. The work was the point. The recognition came eventually.