For most of her career Karikó was the person in the lab whose grants kept getting rejected. She believed mRNA could be used as medicine, the field thought it was a dead end, and the University of Pennsylvania demoted her.
She kept going. With Drew Weissman she found that tweaking one building block of mRNA stopped the body's immune system from attacking it. That fix sat in journals for years, quietly, until COVID arrived and two vaccines were built on it in under a year.
She won the Nobel Prize in 2023. She talks about all of it without much bitterness, mostly about the work itself.