Breaking Through: My Life in Science

by Katalin Karikó

Sometimes a complex and satisfying life—or the complexity of life itself—can look, to others, like nothing at all.

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.

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.

It wasn’t just vaccines that we had access to. Sometimes the whole school, or entire classes, would walk en masse to the dentist or to the pediatrician or to get our lungs x-rayed to find those with tuberculosis. Nobody resisted, nobody argued, nobody suggested that healthcare and education should be compartmentalized or that vaccines had no place in schools. There was a sense that we were all in it together. This was how we looked out for one another.

Sometimes, I think, that is the best we can do: to learn from the world we’ve been handed and then try to leave things a little bit better for the next generation.

What I lacked in natural ability, I could make up for in effort. I could work harder, put in more hours, do more, and do it with greater care.

I still don’t know what my father knew about this man, or what he’d seen. But I took this in. Then I did what I had to. I interviewed the man, collected his memories, and wrote my glowing essay. But I did so having learned a truth: That some tasks are bullshit. That my subject was a bullshit man. That sometimes bullshit men are lauded as heroes.

We have been discussing, among other things, molecular biology, the way life depends on, and is transmitted by, genetic material. DNA and RNA are the building blocks of life, essential to life, yet they themselves are not alive. They break down into molecules, then into atoms.

The Stress of Life is important to me for another reason: Reading Selye’s words, I come to understand that stress isn’t merely a negative physiologic experience; it has positive forms, too—such as excitement, anticipation, and motivation. While negative stress can be harmful—it can, in fact, kill you—positive stress is necessary for a fulfilling life. And with the right attitude, we can transform negative stress into positive stress. How? By focusing on the things we can control, instead of the things we can’t.

When faced with setbacks or failures, we mustn’t blame others; assigning blame keeps us focused on things over which we have no power. Instead, we can respond to misfortune by learning more, working harder, and being more creative.

The history of science, it turns out, is filled with stories of very smart people laughing at good ideas.

But in 1960, after a series of failures, two independent experiments would confirm that the Pasteur researchers were correct: There is, in fact, a short-lived messenger that transports genetic information from the DNA to the ribosomes, where it gets translated to protein, then disappears. Today, we call that little substance not X but rather messenger RNA, or mRNA.

DNA to mRNA to protein, with all the information coded in the DNA and RNA by the order of nucleoside bases, all those tiny letters in the language of life. Again and again, this process unfolds—everywhere in your body, all the time, including at this very moment.

Do not believe that hard work and happiness are in opposition. Do not believe that one must embrace leisure to know joy. These years in Szeged were among the happiest of my life.

A good rule of thumb for determining the relative healthfulness of a particular fat is this: The lower the temperature at which a fat goes from liquid to solid, the healthier that fat is. Bacon fat, for example, is completely solid at room temperature. Not so healthy. Olive oil, by contrast, is liquid at room temperature. It solidifies only when refrigerated, so therefore it is healthier than bacon fat.

But you find an excuse only if you don’t want to accomplish something. If you genuinely want to do it, you find a way. You sit down, get to work, learn how to transform what you have into what you need. Me, I wanted to find a way.

She was saying the very same thing I myself had told Béla on several occasions. This will never work. But there is something about me. When someone insists that something must be one way, I often feel compelled to do the opposite.

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.)

They’re tiny. There’s not much to them, either. A virus is a strip of genetic material (typically a single strand of RNA, though there are also DNA viruses and double-stranded RNA viruses) surrounded by a protective coating. Proteins on their surfaces have evolved to connect with receptors present on cells inside the host. This is generally how a virus begins to enter a host cell. And enter a cell it must.

Near the very end of The Stress of Life, the book that had so moved me as a high school student, Selye thinks carefully about two mutually exclusive responses to stress in human relations: revenge and gratitude. Revenge, he notes, is an attempt to relieve stress. It is a very human response to a threat to one’s security. But revenge, he observes, “has no virtue whatever, and can only hurt both the giver and the receiver of its fruits.” Revenge brings only more revenge, in an endless cycle. If the goal is to relieve stress in a way that enhances one’s life, rather than detracts from it, there is a better way: One can be grateful.

I thanked him politely, now understanding something new: People forget. They forget the specifics of how things were, the whole messy story of what they did, or how those things might have affected someone else. And if I demanded that Suhadolnik remember things as I did? If I insisted that he apologize for how he behaved, or feel remorse? I’m certain the only result would be this: I’d wait forever. Some part of me would remain eternally stuck in 1988, threatened by someone who wasn’t even there anymore. I’d end up like Mr. Bitter, with his grievances and his sour stomach.

Still, I’d do it all again if I could: the cheering, the pom-poms, every loud, embarrassing moment. I think it matters, having your own personal cheerleader. I think everyone deserves to know, Here is someone who believes in me. Here is someone who believes I can do great things, and who will never, ever quit rooting for me.

All vaccines work the same way: by safely introducing a specific antigen to a body, along with an immune activator, called an adjuvant. There are many ways to do this. Some vaccines contain a weakened version of a live virus, others use a dead or inactivated virus, while still others use a recombinant protein, composed of a recognizable but noninfectious part of the pathogen.

I did the only thing I knew how to do: I sang to her, the same song I’d sung to her when she was young, the same song I myself needed to hear: But this luster can only be yours If you mine for it yourself. I know you’ll realize it was worth it… I know it’s hard, I was trying to say, but everything you ever earn will be so much sweeter, because you gave it your best effort.

It would be impossible to fully capture in these pages the urgency and energy of the months of 2020. Entire books have been written about the development of the vaccine, including a book co-authored by Uğur and Özlem, and one by Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive officer. What I will say here is this: It was a stunning effort, one that required courage, expertise, decisiveness, and precision. I saw these traits not only at the highest levels of leadership—Albert, Uğur, and Özlem—but also among everyone who worked on this project: employees, contractors, suppliers, and other professionals.

Many of the things about which people wrote were untrue. The vaccines don’t alter your DNA, of course; they don’t get near it. That’s the advantage of mRNA. Occasionally, though, I’d see falsehoods that were based on a grain of truth. For example, anything that elicits an immune activation can temporarily change a menstrual cycle. When the first vaccines were used one hundred years ago, this phenomenon was also observed and published. The changes are temporary, a sign of your immune system at work. They aren’t dangerous, and before long, everything returns to normal.

There is such a gap between what people know and what they would need to know to fully understand the vaccines and medicines that save lives. That gap, right now, is wide open for exploitation. We must somehow close it. So when the questions came in, I tried to do what I could. I responded to hundreds of messages, maybe thousands by now. I pointed people to studies and data that explained why they need not fear. I didn’t do this because I’m on “team vaccine.” This isn’t a football game. I did it because I’m a scientist. I have spent years scrutinizing data—my own more than anyone else’s. I want people to understand what those data actually say.

My first message is this: We can do better. I believe we can improve how science is done at academic research institutions. For one thing, we might create a clearer distinction between markers of prestige—titles, publication records, number of citations, grant funding, committee appointments, etiquette, dollars per net square footage—and those of quality science. Too often, we conflate the two, as if they’re one and the same. But a person isn’t a better scientist because she publishes more, or first. Perhaps she’s holding back from publication because she wants to be absolutely certain of her data. Similarly, the number of citations might have little to do with the value of the paper and more to do with external events. When Drew and I published our landmark Immunity paper, it barely got any notice. It took a pandemic for the world to understand what we’d done and why it mattered. We can also expand the criteria by which we measure our scientists. Most institutions define a scientist’s value, first and foremost, by their funding. But most grants require a researcher to define at a very high level of detail what work they will do, what discoveries they might make. I’d argue that science, at its best, is about asking questions, trying things, and going wherever that inquiry takes you. It requires walking into the unknown—the unknown is the very point!

On an ordinary day on the streets of Szeged, as I walked home from a clinic feeling horribly ill, I had a flash of insight: No one would ever miss the contribution I didn’t make. No one would knock on my door and beg me to continue working. If I stopped, or if I pulled back my efforts one bit at a time until I was giving less than my full potential, the loss would go entirely unnoticed. A world that’s missing an important contribution looks ordinary. It is the definition of the status quo.