Breaking Through: My Life in Science

by Katalin Karikó

Going by the way some textbooks present the cell, one can almost imagine that it’s a bit like a backyard pool, with inflatable toys bobbing around, just waiting for something to happen. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Every cell is like a sci-fi city that never sleeps.

We thin the plants, pull weeds from the soil, fertilize the ground with cow manure, and then harvest the crops. We give the kernels to the animals, then use the cobs to fuel the kitchen stove. Everything is like that: Nothing goes to waste. We shake walnuts from trees, eat the nuts, and burn the leftover shells as fuel. It will be years before plastic becomes a part of my life, years before I understand the concept of garbage, the idea that some things are so useless they can simply be thrown away.

My father has other gifts, too. He can multiply two-digit numbers in his head, giving you an accurate answer immediately. My sister and I test him throughout our childhoods, and he almost never makes a mistake. This, too, is a lesson for me, one that goes well beyond mathematics: Intelligence and education are not the same thing. A person may lack prestige or a diploma but nevertheless have a swift mind. For much of my life, I assume that everyone knows this, that this fact is so obvious it isn’t something that needs to be learned. Only later, when I begin to work in academia, will I come to understand this isn’t the case—not at all.

But I, and likely every child I know, couldn’t tell you the exact place where work ends and play begins, where responsibility and pleasure cleave. The boundaries between these things are hazy, indistinct. We toil and we enjoy. We contribute and we receive. And of all my early lessons that prepared me to be a scientist, that one, I think, is the most important of all: that work and play can bleed into each other, become one and the same, until the very idea of their distinction feels meaningless.

You ask one question at a time. Then you change just one variable and ask again. And then you change the next variable. And then the next. Just one more thing. There’s almost always just one more thing.

Every new finding contributes not only an answer…but also brand-new questions, ones that no one even thought to ask. Science is like a puzzle of infinite shape and scale, pieced together by many people across the globe. You, working on a tiny part of that puzzle, might spend years searching for a particular piece that you can snap into place. When at last you find it (Aha, it fits!), you don’t merely complete a section of the puzzle, you also open new ways for the puzzle to grow.

Imagine your own work being held up to the light, audited by multiple people, the best in your field, with the goal of finding every possible mistake. It’s nerve-racking, but it’s critically important. Peer review is the best way we have to distinguish fact from myth, to minimize the very human inclination toward motivated reasoning (to see what we want to see) and confirmation bias (to see what we expect to see). Being published in a scientific journal is a way of confirming that you’ve done everything in your power to be intellectually honest. That you’re doing science right.

Our world is so complex. There’s more here than any one person will ever be able to understand. And it is always fascinating to see how people respond when the complexity moves beyond their understanding. Sometimes, people get angry. I have seen so many people get furious simply because they don’t understand something. In these cases, they treat the complexity itself like some nefarious plot. (This anger, of course, is protective. It protects them from the fear that comes from uncertainty.)

Looking back, I wonder if that is the most insidious part of a society that asks its people to turn against one another, to report one another to the state—not so much what does happen, but rather the way we are left wondering about whether and how much the events of our own life were influenced by forces just out of sight.

Sometimes today people ask me what it takes for a woman to be a mother and a successful scientist. The answer is simple, obvious: One needs high-quality and affordable childcare, as I had in Hungary.

Dr. Suhadolnik had rented for us an apartment in Lynnewood Gardens, a sprawling suburban apartment complex, a thousand units spread over a hundred acres. To be honest, it wasn’t as nice as our apartment in Szeged; it didn’t have a washing machine, for one thing. Also, we would discover the ceilings were thin, and when somebody in the apartment above moved about, we could hear every footstep. But it had everything we needed, and by the time we arrived, weary and overwhelmed, it felt like heaven.

It’s an interesting thing, living in a new country. It can be difficult at first to distinguish the general from the particular. When you encounter behavior that seems odd—different, somehow, from what you’re used to—it can be a challenge to know whether you’re looking at a difference in culture or in personality. Am I experiencing my new home? Or one specific individual who happens to live here? The picture forms eventually. But it takes time.

I think today about this whole sorry episode. I remember Suhadolnik’s rage, his threats, the things he did later to carry out those threats. And the main thing I think is this: That man overplayed his hand. Even after three years, this man didn’t understand me a bit, didn’t get how I worked. He didn’t understand that threatening me was the fastest, surest way to get me to do the opposite of what he wanted.

In those days, being both a mother and an academic researcher was a bit of a rarity. Places like Penn just weren’t set up for working mothers. Early on, Jean observed that talented women scientists often became lab managers—running things from behind the scenes, while never being given credit for their work. She and I agreed that we wanted something different: We wanted to be the ones making discoveries, not merely assisting while others, usually men, made breakthroughs.

Plenty of students at Penn did roll their eyes about me—about the articles I waved around that didn’t seem directly relevant to their career aspirations or about my demands for precision in the lab or about the fact that I was a non-tenure-track faculty member who did her own experiments because she didn’t even have any postdocs working with her.

But still. That doesn’t explain why David chose to respect me. I had no prestige in that department, no grants, no committee appointments, no budget of my own. I had nothing to offer him but that which I’d learned. I was basically a nobody at Penn—a nobody who could at times be sharp with people. But maybe that was the point. Maybe in that early, untactful moment when I told him his work was “shit,” he’d glimpsed something important: I would tell him the truth. If I complimented him, it had nothing to do with who his father had been. If I respected him, it was because he’d earned my respect. He did earn it, too. What can I say? Sometimes people surprise you.

would do thousands of experiments in Elliot’s lab. Maybe that sounds like a lot. But you have to understand how science works. While an individual experiment is the smallest possible unit of the research process, it is not in itself research. In science, your overarching goal is to develop and test hypotheses; to do this, you need results not from one single experiment but rather from a mountain of them. You need to do each experiment many different times, each time changing only one variable. For each experiment, you also need control studies, in which no variables are changed, so you have a point of comparison.

The world was changing fast. When I arrived at Penn, the science library still used card catalogs, and science journals had to be read in print. By 2002, a little more than a decade after I arrived, all that would change. Science publications, including back issues, would be digitized; I could read them and save them to my laptop from anywhere in the world. But in 1997, the year I moved to neurosurgery, I still wandered through remote stacks of the library, picking up hard copies of Cell, as well as dozens of other journals, flipping through physical pages one at a time.

In those days, I talked about mRNA with all who would listen, regardless of their department or field of study. I’ll admit, I was a bit like a street vendor, hawking my big idea to anyone who might want it. mRNA! Get your mRNA right here! I’ve got mRNA for heart surgery! mRNA for brain surgery! I’ll give you mRNA for whatever therapy you might need! Trust me, you won’t find better mRNA anywhere!

I’d never paid much attention to rowing before. Until now, I’d never noticed that rowers move backward. This means they can’t see where they are heading as they row. The only person in the boat who can see the finish line is a small coxswain who faces the rowers, directs their efforts, and steers the boat. Because Susan couldn’t see the finish line, she had little sense of where she was in relation to it. There could be no calibrating her distance, no reassuring herself that she was almost there, no pacing herself to save something for the end. With every stroke, she simply had to go as hard as she possibly could. It reminded me of my experiments, the way I never had a sense of whether a breakthrough would come or how long it would take. I simply had to trust that hard work, if I gave it my all, would get me somewhere, eventually.