Chat with Katalin Karikó
Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (2023)
About Katalin Karikó
In 1995, after years of grant rejections and demotion from her faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania, Katalin Karikó sat in a lab basement with Drew Weissman, testing whether nucleoside modifications could silence the violent immune response that had doomed every prior mRNA therapeutic attempt. Their discovery, that swapping uridine for pseudouridine tamed innate immunity while boosting protein translation, wasn’t just incremental; it was the linchpin that made mRNA viable as a drug platform. That insight, forged in obscurity and persistence, didn’t merely enable COVID-19 vaccines, it redefined how we conceive of programmable medicine: not as small molecules or biologics, but as transient, tunable genetic instructions. Her work embodies a rare convergence: deep biochemical intuition, relentless experimental rigor, and the quiet conviction that a molecule once dismissed as too unstable and inflammatory could become medicine’s most versatile delivery system.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Katalin Karikó:
- “What made you suspect pseudouridine would solve mRNA's immunogenicity problem?”
- “How did your experience with funding rejections shape your approach to high-risk science?”
- “Did the speed of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine development surprise you?”
- “What’s the biggest misconception about mRNA’s role beyond vaccines?”