According to the Nobel official website, on October 2, local time, the winners of the "2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine" were announced. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, announced that the prize would be awarded to American scientists and Hungarian female biochemists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.
Katalin Kauriko grew up in Hungary, the daughter of a butcher. She wanted to be a scientist, even though she had never met one. She moved to the United States in her 20s, but has had no fixed position for decades and has been wandering on the fringes of academia. Her research work with her close collaborator Dr. Drew Weisman of the University of Pennsylvania discovered nucleotide base modifications, which laid the foundation for the successful Pfizer-Berntech and Moderna vaccines. They will share the 11 million Swedish krona prize (approximately 7.32 million yuan).
The Nobel Prize Committee said that this year's laureates have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with the immune system through their groundbreaking discoveries. They contributed to the unprecedented speed of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.
Kaurico has spent his career studying mRNA, the genetic script that delivers deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) instructions to a cell's protein-making machinery. She determined that mRNA could be used to instruct cells to produce drugs, including vaccines.
In 1985, she was fired from the Szeged Biological Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She originally hoped to find a position in Europe, but ended up moving to the United States, where Temple University offered her a postdoctoral position. Four years later, she had a conflict with her mentor. The main reason was that they had different views on mRNA, and her mentor was not optimistic about mRNA research. In 1990, Carrico joined the University of Pennsylvania.
But for many years, her job at Penn was in jeopardy. She moved from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to add her to the team. Her annual income never exceeded $60,000.
In 1995, due to failure to apply for scientific research funds, the University of Pennsylvania prepared to fire Kauriko. At that time, she was diagnosed with cancer, and her husband could not come to the United States due to visa issues. Considering her difficult situation, the school decided to keep her after reducing her salary and demoting her. She recalled that she had just made some important discoveries, and the school kicked her out of the laboratory and arranged a small room for her to work in next to the animal room.
Due to restrictions from all parties, it can be said to be difficult to do things. She had no money to subscribe to magazines, so in order to see the latest papers, she had to make copies. During a photocopying trip in 1997, Carrico met immunologist Drew Weissman, who had just arrived at Penn. Weissman was intrigued by Carrico's ideas and decided to fund her continued research, and her project officially became the "Weisman-Carrico Project."
In 2013, Carrico had another disagreement with the University of Pennsylvania. The school refused to reinstate her teaching position, which had been reduced in salary in 1995, and they disagreed with her over the sale of intellectual property rights to another company. Eventually Carrico chose to resign and join BioNTech as senior vice president. The school said BioNTech was a small company that didn't even have a website, implying that Carrico's choice was worthless.
During her silent and miserable years of research, it was her daughter Zsuzsanna Francia who became famous earlier than Carrico. Perhaps inheriting her mother's perseverance, Zusana won consecutive rowing championships at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics.
On November 8, 2020, the first test results of the Pfizer-Berntech vaccine were released, indicating that the mRNA vaccine has strong protective efficacy against this new virus. Corrico turned to her husband and said, "Oh, that works. I knew it was." To celebrate, she ate an entire box of chocolate-covered peanuts, all to herself.