Dr. Lucky Tran Oct 2, 2023
Katalin Karikó was the daughter of a butcher. She wanted to be a scientist, although she had never met one. She immigrated to the US in her 20s, but for decades never found a permanent position, receiving little support from the scientific establishment. Now she’s a Nobel winner!
Show threadDr. Lucky Tran Oct 2, 2023

Katalin Karikó won a Nobel Prize for her work on the COVID mRNA vaccines. Yet just 10 years earlier, UPenn kicked her out of academia.

"They told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality. When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.'"

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfizer-biontech

How mRNA went from a scientific backwater to a pandemic crusher

For decades, Katalin Karikó's work into mRNA therapeutics was overlooked by her colleagues. Now it's at the heart of the two leading coronavirus vaccines

WIRED UK
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@luckytran
The article is from 2020, but hey, what a story.
How many millions of lives saved? It's incomprehensible.
Oct 2, 2023 at 6:56pmWeb