Science

 

This scientist’s decades of mRNA research led to both COVID-19 vaccines

Half an hour outside Philadelphia, in a modest suburban home, lives a quirky, cheerful 65-year-old scientist who’s a big part of the reason people might be able to throw away their masks next year.

The pioneering Dr. Katalin Kariko — who fled Communist-run Hungary at 30 for the US in 1985 with $1,200 hidden inside her 2-year-old daughter’s teddy bear — isn’t as powerful or rich as Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel or BioNTech’s Ugur Sahin. Nor has she ever been celebrated.

Kariko’s obsessive 40 years of research into synthetic messenger RNA was long thought to be a boring dead-end. She said she was chronically overlooked, scorned, fired, demoted, repeatedly refused government and corporate grants, and threatened with deportation — among other indignities.

Now, while others are earning billions, if you ask her what her cut is, she rolls her eyes with a rueful laugh and says, “maybe $3 million.”

All along, though, Kariko held fast to her belief in mRNA, which has turned out to be key to building the complicated technology behind the new vaccines developed by Moderna and Germany’s BioNTech (which has teamed with Pfizer.)

Scientists say they couldn’t have won the global vaccine race without her.

“Yes, I was humiliated quite a bit but now you can see that I was right all along,” Kariko told The Post while smiling and joking in her living room. “It’s all OK. I just love my work and I continue to believe in all its possibilities. I’m just so happy I lived long enough to see my work bear fruit.”