She Was Fired. Demoted. Ignored. Then She Changed Medicine Forever.

Nobody in the main hall at Lindau Inselhalle would have expected a Lecture about mRNA to begin with a Hungarian butcher, a one-room house without running water, and a joke about sausages. Yet that is exactly how Nobel Laureate in Medicine 2023 Katalin Karikó opened her Lecture at the 75^th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting – and from that moment on, she had the room’s undivided attention.

A Scientist Nobody Believed In

Karikó who premiered this year in Lindau grew up in a small Hungarian town of around 10,000 people, in an adobe house with a single room and no running water. Her father was a butcher. Although she had never met a scientist in her life, she knew from an early age that she wanted to become one herself.

Speaking to several hundred Young Scientists and dozens of fellow Nobel Laureates in the audience, she shared a philosophy she had first encountered at the age of sixteen, when she read a book on stress: focus on what you can change – even when life becomes difficult. It was a principle that would guide her through every setback that followed.

The decades for her to come were about research on messenger RNA at a time when most scientists considered it an unstable and practically unusable molecule. No funding. No recognition. Demotions. Job losses. A field that produced, as she recalled in her Lindau Lecture, just one scientific publication per year.

“I didn’t get the money – nothing. I was an outsider. But I had one advantage: I had freedom.”

That freedom – of someone with nothing left to lose – ultimately led to the mRNA breakthroughs that formed the basis of the first COVID-19 vaccines. And, eventually, to Stockholm.

The Meeting That Changed Everything

In 1997, Karikó met American immunologist Drew Weissman. He wanted to develop vaccines. She had RNA. So she offered to make some for him.

What followed became one of the most significant scientific collaborations of the past century. Together, they tackled one of the central obstacles to mRNA medicine: the inflammatory responses that early mRNA variants consistently triggered. Their joint work – in particular on nucleoside-modified mRNA – is now considered foundational to the development of mRNA vaccines. In 2023, both received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Although this story is well known, Karikó’s personal account nevertheless captivated the audience of Young Scientists and fellow Nobel Laureates in Lindau: “If you want to do something, you find a way. If not, you find excuses.”

What Comes Next in mRNA?

The COVID-19 vaccines made mRNA world-famous. But Karikó’s Lindau Lecture made clear that this was not the destination – it was merely the starting line.

More than 150 clinical trials are currently underway worldwide using mRNA-based technologies, including cancer vaccines, personalized cancer therapies, applications for cardiovascular and genetic diseases, diabetic wounds, and CAR T-cell therapies. The platform, she argued, continues to develop at a pace and breadth that would have been difficult to imagine even ten years ago.

Reflecting on the early days of mRNA research, when the field was still small and publications were few and far between, she recalled: “It was easy to follow the literature. Every year there was just one publication out. And when I read these papers later in my life, I didn’t understand, why they didn’t follow up on work.“

A Statement No One Expected

Near the end of her Lecture, Karikó turned directly to the Young Scientists. She had been asked, more times than she could count, what advice she would give to early-career researchers facing rejection and setbacks.

Her answer was not what most people expected. She did not speak about resilience. She did not present a strategy for success. And she did not say: believe in yourself.

Instead, she issued a warning. It may well have been among the most important things said in the Lindau Inselhalle all week – memorable not only for those in the room, but also for everyone watching the recording of the lecture.

This blog post is part of a series showcasing highlights from #LINO75. Most of the Scientific Programme from the recent Lindau Meeting is available in the Lindau Mediatheque.