The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in biochemistry, gender studies, education, and related subjects.

Breaking Through: My Life In Science is by Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian-American biochemist who specializes in ribonucleic acid (RNA)-mediated mechanisms.

Her research, which made some Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines possible, was honored by a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.

The TU Library collection includes several other books about different aspects of biochemistry.

Dr. Karikó spent more than twenty years as a poorly supported researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, where she remains an adjunct professor.

Before she won the Nobel Prize, her employer the University of Pennsylvania demoted her, reduced her pay, and described Karikó as “not of faculty quality”; she was never granted tenure.

Instead, she focused on research in a private company that she founded.

Her findings were used by BioNTech and Moderna to develop their COVID-19 vaccines.

The messenger RNA-based technology developed by Karikó and the two most effective vaccines based on it have formed the basis for the effective and successful fight against SARS-CoV-2 virus worldwide and have contributed significantly to the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One colleague remembered her as follows:

Kate was really just unbelievable… She was always incredibly inquisitive. She read voraciously. She would always know the latest technology or the latest paper, even if it was in a totally different area, and she’d put two and two together and say, ‘Well why don’t we do this?’ Or, ‘Why don’t we try this formulation?’

A reviewer of her memoir commented:

She found American academic research fiercely hierarchical, overly competitive, preoccupied with money and publication, and often simply nasty. She also found it cheaper to send her daughter to relatives in Hungary for long periods than pay for American child care. Karikó survived through stubbornness, exquisite precision in her experiments, and success in perfecting a fragile molecule, messenger RNA, to treat disease. For more than three decades, she labored with support from a few scientists but not her university employer, who denied her tenure or a permanent job. It was only after she was forcibly “retired” in 2013 that entrepreneurs began taking mRNA seriously. She became a celebrity in 2021 when pharmaceutical companies using her discoveries won the race to produce Covid-19 vaccines. Developing a new vaccine had never taken fewer than four years; creating one with mRNA succeeded in less than one.

Dr. Karikó observes in her memoir:

Sometimes today people ask me what it takes for a woman to be a mother and a successful scientist. The answer is simple, obvious: One need high-quality and affordable childcare, as I had in Hungary.

Unfortunately, when great childcare isn’t available or affordable, it is usually the mother who sacrifices herself. The truth is, I have rarely, in all my years in US academia, found families like ours–families in which the husband is the primary caretaker so that the woman can be a researcher.

Sure, you can find families where both parents work high-level jobs. But there’s a catch: That family, the one with two working parents, must already have money. If they don’t have some existing source of wealth? No. you won’t find it. It doesn’t work. […]

When people look back on my career, they tend to point to only a few contributions, the ones directly related to the breakthroughs that came later. But scientific inquiry is rarely, if ever, linear—especially in basic research.

In an interview posted online, she added that

At UPenn, she often struggled to get grants and bounced from lab to lab.

In medical school in the United States, researchers are responsible for applying for grants to fund their work. If you’re not doing research, you need to teach or work with patients. Karikó says she wasn’t doing the latter two and her grant money was not coming in.

“If I don’t bring in the money I don’t deserve the working space,” she says. “So that’s the rule. Every university is like that.”

After her Nobel Prize win brought out stories of her career struggles, those in the academic community were quick to point out how hard it is for researchers in the U.S., especially those from another country, to fund their research.

You’re more likely to get grants if you’re a tenured faculty member, but you’re more likely to get promoted to tenure if you get grants, Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at the New England Complex Systems Institute told CNBC Make It. Feigl-Ding was formerly a faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School.

“There is a vicious cycle,” he says.

If you’re an immigrant, it’s even more difficult to get tenure, Feigl-Ding says: “There are biases. If you have a Ph.D. from an American Ivy League [university], that’s better compared to if you have a degree from a foreign university.”

Universities also tend to look at how much a researcher publishes, or how widely covered by the media their work is, as opposed to how innovative the research is.

The type of work Karikó does, Feigl-Ding says, doesn’t make splashy headlines, because groundbreaking work rarely does.

“Nobel Prizes are slow, tedious, methodical lab work,” he says. “Albert Einstein didn’t publish that many papers. But in this day and age volume is king.”

Karikó, too, knows that a lack of name recognition was a hindrance for her.

“I was nobody,” she says. “I was not a famous speaker. So many immigrant scientists are like that. Every time when I get an award, I am thinking about them. Why I didn’t stop researching is because I did not crave recognition.”

None of these setbacks dulled her interest in mRNA or embittered her about the scientific community, she says.

“You don’t have to hold a grudge against somebody, because it poisons you and the other person won’t even remember,” she says. […]

Karikó’s career seems like an exercise in rejection. What kept her going, she says, wasn’t that she felt like her long hours would eventually pay off with worldwide recognition, but that she didn’t care if they did. There was constant progress, she says, even if it wasn’t noticed or celebrated.

“I felt successful when others considered me unsuccessful because I was in full control of what I was doing,” she says.

When she talks to younger generations, she emphasizes that they should just focus on the work. If you learn something new, that’s a win.

“Young ones are always comparing themselves to each other,” she says. “Like, ‘Oh, he works less and is advancing more and getting more money.’ It is such a distraction. There will always be somebody who is the favorite. If I would have paid attention to the fact that I’m there on Saturday and Sunday and these people are not there and they get money and get the grants and they are promoted and they are not knowing so many things, then I wouldn’t be here.” 

She credits her ability to handle adversity to Hans Selye, a Hungarian endocrinologist who pioneered stress research. She read his work when she was 16.

“He said you have to learn how to make negative stress into positive stress,” she says.

In other words, you need to see things that challenge you as motivating, not debilitating.

After her Nobel Prize win, she says, an old colleague from Hungary reached out to congratulate her. She says he told her: “Kati, congrats — and be careful. If all of these difficulties couldn’t deter you to go straight and do research, let’s hope that all this recognition won’t do that.”

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)