Dismissed by many, Dr. Katalin Karikó remained passionate about mRNA therapeutics.
The coronavirus vaccines wouldn’t be possible without advancements developed at the University of Pennsylvania, which has been touting its contribution in news releases and TV ads. But it turns out the school wasn’t very supportive of the scientist who led the charge.
Former Penn researcher Dr. Katalin Karikó’s dedication to the promise of using messenger RNA (mRNA) in medicine paved the way for the vaccines now giving society hope.
As Karikó worked for decades toward adapting mRNA to bring out its therapeutic qualities, her efforts were repeatedly dismissed by the university, she has said. When she was unable to find funding, Penn demoted her, taking her off the track to full professorship.
“Usually, at that point, people just say goodbye and leave because it’s so horrible,” Karikó, known as Kati, told Stat News in November.
The breakthrough finally came in 2005, after Karikó found a colleague whose passion for the topic mirrored hers in Dr. Drew Weissman. Now 65, she’s a VP at a biotech firm. Both she and Weissman, a professor at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, were quoted in a recent release from the university.
“I feel humbled, and happy,” says Karikó in the release, referred to as an adjunct professor. “I am more [of] a basic scientist, but I always wanted to do something to help patients.”.
Penn officials declined to comment on their relationship with Karikó, previous or current. “We are unable to discuss specifics about faculty or staff employment matters,” spokesperson Stephen Maccarthy told Billy Penn.
Despite the university’s original attitude toward Karikó’s research, it holds the patent on the tech used in the COVID-19 vaccines.+
From Hungary to Temple to Penn
It was 1961 when scientists first discovered mRNA was how DNA got translated into the proteins that make up the body. It was the missing link, the way genes get expressed in everyday life.
Over the next couple decades, researchers began to explore whether they could use mRNA to teach the body to make its own medicine. But with few advancements, the topic fell out of fashion.
Except for one Hungarian biochemist.
Karikó started studying gene therapy at the University of Szeged in her native country. She finished her PhD in 1982, with an unrelenting passion for mRNA advancements.
“I always thought that the majority of patients don’t actually need new genes, they need something temporary like a drug, to cure their aches and pains,” Karikó told Wired earlier this month.
With mRNA research more popular in the United States, Karikó opted to immigrate with her husband and 2-year-old daughter. At the time, Hungarians were prohibited from taking their money to a new country — so when Karikó sold her car, according to France24, she stashed the cash in her daughter’s teddy bear.
The hopeful scientist scored a job at Temple, and moved to Philly in 1985. Four years later, she left because of a dispute with her boss, who attempted to have her deported, per Wired. (Temple did not respond to a request for comment.)
Karikó moved on to the University of Pennsylvania, where she diligently searched for research funding. She applied for grants and hit up venture capitalists in New York City. No one would bite.
“They initially promised to give us money,” Karikó said of the venture capitalists, “but then they never returned my phone calls.”
After six years, her bosses at Penn were reportedly so frustrated by the lack of momentum that they cut her salary and demoted her.
“I thought of going somewhere else, or doing something else,” Karikó told Stat News. “I also thought maybe I’m not good enough, not smart enough. I tried to imagine: Everything is here, and I just have to do better experiments.”
A sympathetic colleague, and a move to biotech
Things didn’t look up until 1997, when colleague Drew Weissman got to Penn.
He and Karikó met over their department’s copy machine, per Wired, where they realized their shared interests and started working together. It took seven years, but the pair eventually figured out how to make mRNA therapy work.
In 2005, Karikó and Weissman published their groundbreaking study. The University of Pennsylvania licensed the technology and patented it. (Researchers’ patents are often held by the institutions where they work.)
Karikó stayed on at Penn for eight years, but was never reinstated her to the tenure track position she held before she was demoted.
“We are grateful for Dr. Karikó’s important contributions both during her time at Penn,” said university spokesperson Maccarthy, “where she continues to hold an appointment as an adjunct associate professor.” The school’s promo video about mRNA technologyfocuses on Weissman, mentioning Karikó only in passing.
In 2013, she gave up on the Ivy League institution and took a senior VP role at BioNTech, a pharma firm valued at almost $28 billion as of spring 2021. The company partnered with Pfizer to make the first COVID vaccine, with Karikó working as a key player.
She herself was vaccinated last week — at Penn.
“I’m hopeful,” Karikó said, “now that there is so much interest and excitement for this research, that it will be possible to develop and test this mRNA vaccine technology for prevention and treatment of other diseases, too.”
The College Board, the New York based nonprofit that oversees the SAT, said it has worried about income inequality influencing test results for years. White students scored an average of 177 points higher than black students and 133 points higher than Hispanic students in 2018 results. Asian students scored 100 points higher than white students. The children of wealthy and college-educated parents outperformed their classmates.
“There are a number of amazing students who may have scored less [on the SAT] but have accomplished more,” said David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board. “We can’t sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT.”
.. Yale University is one of the schools that has tried using applicants’ adversity scores. Yale has pushed to increase socioeconomic diversity and, over several years, has nearly doubled the number of low-income and first-generation-to-attend-college students to about 20% of newly admitted students, said Jeremiah Quinlan, the dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale.
.. The new score—which falls on a scale of one through 100—will pop up on something called the Environmental Context Dashboard, which shows several indicators of relative poverty, wealth and opportunity as well as a student’s SAT score compared with those of their classmates. On the dashboard, the score is called “Overall Disadvantage Level.”
An adversity score of 50 is average. Anything above it designates hardship, below it privilege.
The College Board declined to say how it calculates the adversity score or weighs the factors that go into it. The data that informs the score comes from public records such as the U.S. Census as well as some sources proprietary to the College Board, Mr. Coleman said.
.. The College Board began developing the tool in 2015 because colleges were asking for more objective data on students’ backgrounds, said Ms. Betterton. Several college admissions officers said they worry the Supreme Court may disallow race-based affirmative action. If that happens, the value of the tool would rise, they said.“The purpose is to get to race without using race,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Mr. Carnevale formerly worked for the College Board and oversaw the Strivers program.
.. The dashboard may also be an advantage in a tight competition for market share with the ACT, another college-admissions exam. A spokesman for the ACT said it is “investing significant resources” in a comparable tool that is expected to be announced later this year.
At Florida State University, the adversity scores helped the school boost nonwhite enrollment to 42% from 37% in the incoming freshman class, said John Barnhill, assistant vice president for academic affairs at Florida State University. He said he expects pushback from parents whose children go to well-to-do high schools as well as guidance counselors there.
“If I am going to make room for more of the [poor and minority] students we want to admit and I have a finite number of spaces, then someone has to suffer and that will be privileged kids on the bubble,” he said.
The power is in Rogers’s radical kindness at a time when public kindness is scarce. It’s as if the pressure of living in a time such as ours gets released in that theater as we’re reminded that, oh yes, that’s how people can be.
Moral elevation gains strength when it is scarce.
.. Mister Rogers was a lifelong Republican and an ordained Presbyterian minister. His show was an expression of the mainline Protestantism that was once the dominating morality in American life.
.. Once, as Tom Junod described in a profile for Esquire, Rogers met a 14-year-old boy whose cerebral palsy left him sometimes unable to walk or talk. Rogers asked the boy to pray for him.
The boy was thunderstruck. He had been the object of prayers many times, but nobody had asked him to pray for another. He said he would try since Mister Rogers must be close to God and if Mister Rogers liked him he must be O.K.
Junod complimented Rogers on cleverly boosting the boy’s self-esteem, but Rogers didn’t look at the situation that way at all: “Oh, heavens no, Tom! I didn’t ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. I asked him because I wanted his intercession.”
And here is the radicalism that infused that show: that
the child is closer to God than the adult;
that the sick are closer than the healthy;
that the poor are closer than the rich and
the marginalized closer than the celebrated.
Rogers often comforted children on the show and taught them in simple terms, but the documentary shows how he did so with a profound respect for the dignity of each child that almost rises to veneration. You see his visceral disgust for shows that don’t show respect — that dump slime on children, that try to entertain them with manic violence.
In the gospel of Fred Rogers, children are our superiors in the way
they trust each person they meet, the way
they lack guile,
the way a child can admit simple vulnerability.
Rogers was drawing on a long moral tradition, that the last shall be first. It wasn’t just Donald Trump who reversed that morality, though he does represent a cartoonish version of the idea that winners are better than losers, the successful are better than the weak. That morality got reversed long before Trump came on the scene, by an achievement-oriented success culture, by a culture that swung too far from humble and earnest caritas.
Rogers was singing from a song sheet now lost, a song sheet that once joined conservative evangelicals and secular progressives. The song sheet may be stacked somewhere in a drawer in the national attic, ready for reuse once again.