karikó's winter ran about twenty-five years, and the point of her story is that almost nobody — including the institutions paying her — thought it would ever be spring.
it starts with a border. 1985: her lab in communist hungary loses its funding. she, her husband béla and their two-year-old daughter susan decide on america. currency controls mean they can take almost nothing legally, so they sell the car on the black market and sew the money into susan's teddy bear. a family crossing a hard border with their savings inside a stuffed animal. (the exact amount is reported differently across sources; the teddy bear is not in dispute.)
at penn from 1989 she worked on messenger rna — the idea that synthetic mrna could teach cells to make their own medicine. the field considered it a dead end: synthetic mrna set off dangerous immune reactions and fell apart too fast. her grant applications were rejected over and over. and in 1995 it all landed at once: penn demoted her off the tenure track and cut her pay; a health scare hit; her husband was stranded in hungary over a visa. she has said she thought about going somewhere else, doing something else. colleagues, she recalled, responded to her work with pity: 'they felt sorry for me when i said that i'm working with mrna: oh my god, poor kati.' she stayed anyway — lower rank, lower pay, borrowed lab time — and kept doing the experiment.
the turn came at a photocopier, mid-nineties, where she fell into conversation with an immunologist named drew weissman. they worked the problem together for a decade, and in 2005 published the paper that cracked it: swap one of rna's four building blocks (uridine) for a modified version, and the immune system stops sounding the alarm. even that changed nothing at penn — she was never reinstated to the research track, and in 2013 she left for biontech, a small german company. seven years later, the karikó–weissman modification was the molecular heart of the biontech/pfizer and moderna covid vaccines, given to billions of people. in october 2023 she and weissman shared the nobel prize in physiology or medicine. her memoir, breaking through, came out the same month. her daughter, meanwhile, had become a two-time olympic gold medallist in rowing — a family that doesn't quit, apparently.
her own rules from the long stretch, in her words: failure is information — 'you learn more from failure, when things are not working well.' and the one to write down: 'don't compare yourself to others. if i would have compared myself, i would have left the whole field a long time ago.' honest notes: she's living; the 1995 health scare stays unnamed because she hasn't detailed it; and the story isn't one of pure villains — she's credited specific colleagues, weissman above all, with keeping the thread alive.