Katalin Karikó doesn’t want you to blame the university that demoted her, or the journal editors and grant-review committees that rejected her papers and proposals. She’d rather talk about how to formalize institutional support to ensure less-celebrated scholars and their work don’t fall through the cracks.
Assigning blame was a common impulse on social media after Karikó and her colleague Drew Weissman were announced winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their work on messenger-RNA research that paved the way for Covid-19 vaccines.
That was when pieces of Karikó's story went viral. How the University of Pennsylvania demoted her and cut her pay because she hadn’t been able to land grants for what was then considered unconventional research. How an administrator told her, for the same reason, that she was “not of faculty quality” and kicked her out of her lab space. How the paper she and Weissman wrote, putting forth the idea that mRNA could be used in vaccinations, was deemed an “incremental contribution” by Nature and rejected for publication.
Failure, Revisited
On Katalin Karikó's triumphant vindication.
That those struggles ultimately led to Karikó's taking a phone call from Stockholm on Monday gave many academic onlookers a sense of secondhand satisfaction: She’d persevered despite being told no at seemingly every turn. Now, some said, those naysayers should feel humbled. Academics called on Penn to apologize for how it had treated Karikó.
Karikó does hope young scientists take cues from her story, but not the finger-pointing sort. “The blame,” she told The Chronicle, “is twisted.” Yes, she said, funding and publishing systems are fundamentally flawed; they most often reward work that’s in the scientific zeitgeist and not the novel research whose payoff isn’t immediately evident.
The neurosurgery department chair who nagged Karikó over her lack of publications and grants wasn’t an mRNA expert; she shouldn’t expect him to understand the intricacies of her work. What about the grant reviewers at the National Institutes of Health who turned down her proposals? “I really don’t blame them either,” Karikó said. “They have, I don’t know, how many grants to read? They don’t have time, and so they kind of just skim through.”
That’s why it’s so important for academics doing unconventional work to have advocates who are familiar with its contours — colleagues “who are close by and can see that somebody is doing a great thing,” Karikó said. Two such supporters fought for her at Penn: Elliot Barnathan, the cardiologist whose lab she worked in when she arrived at the university, and David Langer, who was a medical student when the two met.
When Karikó was rejected for grants that were supposed to pay her salary, Barnathan stepped in and paid it instead — for seven years. When Barnathan left Penn, leaving Karikó without an academic home — and in danger of losing her job — Langer, then a neurosurgery resident, pleaded Karikó's case with the head of his department, securing her a job there.
I never craved this recognition ... I was in high school the last time I got an award.
Those connections were crucial for Karikó, whose unusual research direction and immigrant status compounded her reputation as an academic outsider. But not every young scholar has a Barnathan or Langer in their corner, a reality that’s especially true of those from underrepresented backgrounds.
So what’s the solution? Karikó envisions a formalized version of that support, whereby scholars who’ve already made it could advocate at the university level for colleagues whose work they feel is promising but hasn’t gained traction. Grant funds could be pooled in a discretionary bucket and distributed based on internal recommendations, to help sustain work like hers. And, Karikó adds, institutions should reward advocates like Barnathan and Langer for helping boost their colleagues’ profiles; she said both men will be her guests at the Nobel Prize ceremony.
Karikó's history of rejections might serve as spite-fueled motivation for other academics who feel spurned by their supervisors or the scientific enterprise. But she’d rather they resist the traditional markers of success, and she warns against the publish-or-perish rat race. That’s no easy feat for the individual scholar trying to eke out a living, she knows: “You have to publish because you have to get the Ph.D. You have nothing to say. Unless you have tons of papers coming out, nobody cares.”
Instead, she says, a kind of pure-mindedness is necessary. The sole goal should be to gain an understanding of one’s field, to resist to whatever extent possible the siren song of career advancement. “As time goes by, you get the first grant, more money. You want promotion,” Karikó said. “And no, that is not your focus — to understand better the science. It will be the tool to publish, and more papers will lead you to get promotion and more money.”
Nor should scholars rely on other external forms of validation. “I never craved this recognition,” Karikó said. “My God, I got the Nobel Prize on Monday. Come on! I was in high school the last time I got an award.”
That streak ended in 2021, when she and Weissman received the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research, months after the Covid-19 vaccines they’d helped pioneer began being injected into frontline workers’ arms. The duo have made the award-ceremony rounds since, and will get their Nobel Prizes in December. In the meantime, Karikó is eager to get back to the lab.
