Katalin Karikó was born in Szolnok, Hungary, beginning the life of the biochemist whose work on modified mRNA would later underpin COVID-19 vaccines.
Katalin Karikó was born on January 17, 1955, in Szolnok, Hungary, to a family of modest means; her father was a butcher. She grew up in the small town of Kisújszállás, where she developed an early fascination with the natural world and biology, nurtured in Hungary's rigorous science education system.
Karikó went on to study biology at the University of Szeged, earning her PhD in biochemistry in 1982. Her early research at the Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences focused on RNA, a molecule then considered a scientific backwater compared to DNA research.
This humble beginning in a small Hungarian town, far from the centers of Western scientific power and prestige, set the stage for a remarkable and often difficult career. Karikó would spend decades pursuing research into messenger RNA that most of the scientific establishment dismissed or ignored, facing repeated grant rejections, demotions, and skepticism before her work became the foundation of the mRNA vaccines that helped end the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her birth in a country then under Soviet-aligned communist rule, with limited resources for scientific research, makes her eventual path to a Nobel Prize a powerful story of perseverance against structural and institutional barriers.
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