Science Friday - The Leap: I Was Considered A Nobody

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Biochemist Kati Karikó spent decades experimenting with mRNA, convinced that she could solve the problems that had kept it from being used as a therapeutic. Her tireless, methodical work was dismissed and she was ridiculed. But that work laid the foundation for the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives, and was recognized by a Nobel Prize in 2023. Kati shares her secret weapon for dealing with stress and naysayers. Plus, neurologist David Langer describes Kati’s exacting research style, and her daughter, Olympic gold medalist Susan Francia, reveals the life lessons that led them both to the winner’s circle.“The Leap” is a 10-episode audio series that profiles scientists willing to take big risks to push the boundaries of discovery. It premieres on Science Friday’s podcast feed every Monday until July 21. “The Leap” is a production of the Hypothesis Fund, brought to you in partnership with Science Friday.Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi, Flora here. We have something really special on the podcast for you today. This is a labor of love for me. It's an audio series I worked on before I came to Science Friday. I made it with the Hypothesis Fund, a science philanthropy that enables scientists to pursue their boldest ideas. And that's what this series is all about. Each episode is an intimate profile of a scientist who was, or in some cases is, out on a limb, pursuing their most daring idea, even if it's risky or unpopular or in the case of today's episode, gets them laughed out of a room. But here's the thing. Sometimes those bold ideas can change the world. You're the first to hear this, and I hope you enjoy it. I want to introduce you to a scientist who spent most of her career in complete obscurity. She was a biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania. I know that Penn is a very prestigious place, but I, you know, I was considered nobody there. They thought that I am crazy. They question my quality as a scientist.

She never ran her own lab, no tenure track. At one point she was demoted. She got one grant ever. Listen, I was working there 24 years. I never gave a lecture. She held on to her job by a thread, until one day she walked into work and found her roly chair, her notebooks, her lab equipment, in the hallway.

A lab tech was throwing. the remainder of her stuff in the garbage can. So I was just like, what's going on here? You know, and she said that you have to talk to the chairman. That was it. She was being forced out. She told her chairman he was making a huge mistake, that what she was doing in that lab would change the world someday.

I literally told the chairman, this place will be a museum. You told him it'd be a museum. That's an amazing thing to say when you're being basically kicked down. out of your job. Yes, because I believe so much that one day, you know, it will be important. And here's the craziest part about this story. She was right. That was Kataline Kariko.

You may recognize the name because 10 years after her stuff was being dumped in the trash, she was on a stage in Stockholm. I invite you now to step forward to receive the Nobel Prize. It's crazy. It's just so unlikely. This is David Langer. He's an old friend and colleague of Catalan Caracos. Most people call her Kati. He calls her Kate. Look, Kate's probably the first Nobel Prize winner that wasn't a professor. You know, it's this weird thing of someone who's completely out of left field who achieves the greatest accomplishment in science.

And it saved the world. You know, it's like, are you kidding me? This research that other scientists had dismissed for decades changed everyone's life on this. planet. It led to the freaking COVID vaccine. I mean, if you look at all the other Nobel Prizers ever, no one has a story like Kate. This is The Leap, a new show about gutsy scientists who have risked their careers, their reputations, and even their lives to make a breakthrough. Hello, girls. Oh, this is for me. Oh, thank you. Producer Annette Heist and I went to Katie's house to talk to her. She greeted us at the door, warm and welcoming, no shoes on, and she immediately put the flowers we brought in water.

are so kind, thank you. And then she took us to her office. And the first thing you notice when you walk in are two walls lined with glass cabinets. Oh, my husband did the, you know, this one also. Did he build it? Yeah, everything given this one. Katie's husband built these cabinets to hold the most science bling I have ever seen in my life, like dozens and dozens of gilded metals.

embossed coins, shiny statuettes. Yeah, that's the Alfred Nobel Prize here. This is wild. I feel like I'm in a museum. Yeah. We sit down and Katte introduces herself. And you'll notice she doesn't mention the prizes or really even much about her work. I am Kotolin Corico and I am a scientist, a biochemist by training.

I am Hungarian and also a U.S. citizen. and I came to this country in 1985. Prior to that, I lived in Hungary, and I was very happy there. I am very happy here. I have a wonderful husband for 44 years. The only bragging she eventually gets to is about her daughter. And then I have a daughter, Suzanne Francia, and she's a two-time Olympic champion, five-time world champion.

I was very proud of her always. Yes, and I have two grandchildren. I feel bad for those grandkids. A grandmother who has a Nobel Prize, a mother who's an Olympic medalist. It's a lot of pressure. They will handle. Katie's rise to science superstardom is surprising in a lot of ways,

including where her story begins. Katie grew up in a humble place, a town in rural communist Hungary. We lived in this very small Adobe House with a reed roof and we had animals, chicken, pigs and cats. And we play mostly on the street. The street was, you know, dirt road. And maybe once a week we have seen a car.

Life was so simple. Katie's mom was a bookkeeper. Her father was a butcher. Neither had gotten much of a formal education. But they made sure their kids did. And from a young age, Katie loved biology. I was not the average kind of person. You know, in elementary school, I already was competing in biology, and I get served best in the country, you know.

And it was a whole week competition. Can you imagine for elementary school children for a whole week? Katie found her own path to science. She didn't come from a long line of scientists. She wasn't pressured to be a doctor. She just loved biology and was determined to study it. She went to university and then graduate school. During that time, she met her future husband, Bella Francia, and later gave birth to their daughter, Susan. And just like with science, Katie did motherhood on her own terms. You know, when mine was born, you know, I first day, you know, I talked to her like a real person.

You know, I introduced myself. Hi, Jujica. I am, my name is, I said my name and I said, I am your mother. And he wanted to hear this story many, many times. because I introduced myself to my own child. But this happened. This was real. Within three months of that moment, Katie was back in the lab. Working on RNA, the family of molecules she'd devote her career to,

and that would later bring her to that award stage in Stockholm. RNA is in all living cells and works alongside DNA. So DNA holds the instruction manual to build and maintain the body, and RNA is kind of like the middle manager that takes those directives and turns them into action items for the time. team. There are different RNAs, but Kati focused on messenger RNA, MRNA. Its job is to carry instructions to factories in the cells that use those instructions to churn out proteins. That's all just basic biology, but here's where Katte followed her intuition again. She thought we should

be able to harness MRNA to use it to direct cells to manufacture beneficial proteins, like proteins that would help us build immunity or help break up clots. To Katie, MRNA seemed like a potentially paradigm-shifting medical tool. But most people thought this was a complete pipette dream. I have to say that when I mentioned to somebody that I make MRNA and I work with it, they usually felt sorry if they were sympathetic or if they were less sympathetic, they thought that I am crazy. It was so disruptive to the conventional wisdom.

Here's David Langer again. He worked with Katie in these early days as a student, and he saw firsthand what she was up against. There's just a basically bias against it. The reason is because there are RNAases, which is the enzyme that basically breaks RNA down. They're all over the labs, and they're all over the body, and they're everywhere.

The problem with RNA is that it's unstable. It breaks down easily. And the prevailing view was that working with it in the lab, keeping it on a shelf, getting it into a cell, all that was basically impossible. But Katte didn't really care about the prevailing view, and she was not scared off. looked at these issues and said, these are just problems that I can solve with the right techniques.

For example, I never wear gloves. Because what I realized, that people wearing gloves, they think that, okay, and then they are touching their forehead, they're touching something, and now it is the RNAs is there. But when I know that I don't have a glove, I work carefully. You're aware. You're more aware. Yes, more aware, because every miniature things, you know, this good laboratory practice, I always said, that's what you have to do. Kate used to be crazy by cleaning all the glassware, for example, how to wash your freaking beakers.

That's how, you know, micro she was. She taught me that to clean a beaker correctly, don't fill the whole thing up. You only fill it up a third of the way and swirl it around twice. It's much better than once because the water coats. This is the kind of crap she was doing. You know, and I still think of that. Like when I'm rinsing out a cup, I never rinse it,

filled up the whole way. You just fill up the bottom third. That was Kate Carrico. The other thing is that Katie is brilliant at experiments. mental design. Solving these little puzzles and looking for clues was all part of the fun. And she looked for inspiration everywhere. Academic journals, historical scientific accounts, law and order. I like to watch the real crime investigation just to understand the logic when you have absolutely no clue, what kind of thinking you need to find a perpetrator and what logic you use. And

And this is like we are investigators, scientific investigators. And this little thing which somehow doesn't fit, that will lead us to the right answers. Katie was always open to letting the data lead her to the truth. I wanted always to poke holes, not to prove it, but disprove. Disprove your idea. Yeah. Because science should be about the truth. That's key strength.

And the truth is that's rare. You want to be right so badly. Because a lot of scientists have a motivation to get granted or to make money, they tend to take their data and prove themselves right. In other words, if you do an experiment and, you know, the data doesn't confirming your hypothesis, then maybe the experiment must be wrong. Rather than taking the data and saying, hey, this is interesting. Even though I wasn't right, what's the reason for this?

That is how Katte approached her research. She was focused on truth-seeking, above all else, which is a noble attribute that came with some serious liabilities. And it may help explain why she was demoted and later forced out of pen. Because while some scientists focused their energy on building their career, publishing, networking, glad-handing the right people, Katie almost seemed allergic to any kind of wheel greasing. She was never afraid to say that person's a complete idiot, even if there were someone who's, you know, everyone thinks is like God's gift to whatever, to medicine. And this would get around.

You know, to excel in science, you have to be agreeable when you 100% not agree. Do this kissing up and things like that to advance in. department or some kind of promotion you need. So many people emphasize that and then they say that it is everywhere. You didn't do that though. No, that's why, you know, I couldn't advance there. But Katty says it didn't matter to her because the lab was her happy place. I did not care that I was there, you know, all weekends and working so long. I hardly can wait in the morning to go to work Because you have to solve so many problems, and that's what science is all about, figuring out something. Oh, this is what's going on.

You just wanted to be in the lab making discoveries. Yes, I remember every little technical thing, like purifying long RNA, realizing that it is nobody ever published on it. And coming up with different ideas, and then, you know, I just wanted to test out. I cannot imagine any other job that would give you that kind of happiness. A turning point came in 1997. Katie was waiting to use the copy machine at Penn and met an immunologist named Drew Weissman. Katty was in the habit of talking up MRNA's therapeutic potential

to kind of anybody who'd listen, and Drew was intrigued. They decided to work together to make an MRNA vaccine. They started with HIV because that's what Drew was working on. And here's the basic idea. Vaccines introduce the body to a harmless version of a pathogen. So your immune system can quickly recognize and attack the real version if you get infected. So Kati had to cook up the MRNA to carry instructions for a piece of the virus. Then they had to get that MRNA into cells.

And then they had to get the cellular factories to use that MRNA to churn out bits of virus. These viral proteins prepare the immune system to recognize the real. virus if it comes along. So they did all that, and then they hit a huge roadblock. Their mRNA was causing inflammation. Now, inflammation can kill people. So if mRNA was going to be used for medicine, this problem had to be solved. And while other people might say, oh, I guess we're done, let's go on to something else, Katie saw this as just the next challenge to work through. She knew she was going to make it work. It was just the puzzle she had to solve. And as long as she could, you know, keep the lights on, she was going to solve the problem. And what's amazing is she did solve the

problem and nobody cared. This is an amazing wrinkle to the story. So in 2005, after years of work, Kati and Drew finally solved the inflammation problem. They figured out how to engineer mRNA in a brand new way so that it didn't trigger inflammation. It was a huge breakthrough. And they were like waiting for the red carpet to be rolled out. But instead they got this. The research ended up in a smaller journal called immunity, because when they brought it to the big top-tier journals, it was rejected. The science was not open to this. Even after they published the paper, nobody cared about it. It's just incredible.

Okay, this is the thing that I don't understand. Why did nobody, especially after that paper, why did nobody care? I think that there's a conventional wisdom that exists, and it's like a power thing. I mean, science is unfair. It's not a, it's really political. a lot of it's self-promotion and who your mentors are and who's fighting the fight for you matters. And, you know, be successful in science

doesn't necessarily mean you're doing good science. It's kind of doing the repeat things and proving what's already known is correct. And people who make these quantum leaps are often, you know, kind of off the side and then all of a sudden, people like, oh my God, why didn't I think of that? But this is probably true of most quantum shifts.

I mean, if it wasn't remarkable, people would have been doing it already. This is an interesting paradox of science. Even though the whole profession revolves around the concept, that data reigns supreme, that opinions must be overturned by evidence, science is comprised of people who, like people everywhere, have their own horse in the race, their own biases, and blind spots. And on top of that, Kati was no good at playing politics. So even though Kati and Drew solved these problems that ultimately won them the Nobel freaking prize, at the time, those breakthroughs didn't do much for Kati's status in the academic world. Kate had no reputation and was seen kind of as a pariah. And I wouldn't say she was laughed at, but sort of.

And I don't know, I think if I was sort of laughed at for decades, especially when I knew I was right, one of two things might happen to me. One, I'd get bitter as hell. But Katy had some ways of mitigating this. I don't let anybody get under my skin. And sometimes when certain people, you know, said something under the table, I put my middle finger up. But then... Did you really? Yes.

But not on the top of the table. And I just, you know, just like released a little immediate stress. And that was it. The other risk of being laughed at for so long is getting defeated. It's hard to keep other people's doubts from warming their way inside of you, rotting your self-confidence. But the people closest to Katie, the ones who knew her the best, said they didn't see any sign of this. She's very tough.

This is Katty's daughter, Susan Francia, the gold medal Olympic rower. But it's interesting, even when she came home and that's the time where you're, you know, you can be vulnerable. I mean, I don't think I ever really saw my mom cry. And to me, this is the most fascinating part of Katie's story. Most people require a healthy dose of positive affirmation to keep on, keep it on. But Katie's work and her ideas were dismissed for decades. And yet she stayed the course. So besides her scientific insights,

what was it about her or her worldview that allowed her to keep betting on herself and her idea? Honestly, I think it's her personality. My mom was always so good about being solution-oriented. She would just be like, okay, this shit happened, what's next? What am I going to do? if you want to do something, you know, you find a way. And if you don't, then you find excuses. That's an aphorism Susan heard a lot over the years. Yeah, yeah, pretty much growing up, that's all I heard.

I mean, when we came to this country, I'm sure she told you, we had like, I think $1,000, maybe not even. And anytime I started to go into brady Susan mode, it was like a very big reminder of we came to this country with nothing. and we're going to make everything of it. So you, it's on you to take this opportunity and to be the best that you can be. I think that also helped me a lot in rowing when it would be like

you end up in the second boat or this or that. And it's almost like that I'll show you attitude, you know? I remember when I was demoted, I was 40 years old and demoted at University of Pennsylvania and then with David Hap, I get this laboratory. And I loudly say, the bench is here. I am in the United States of America.

Where else, if not here? I can do the work. I still can do it. I felt still empowered by that fact that I am here. Do you think that being an immigrant made you more resilient? Yes, I am sure. We arrived here. We had no relatives.

I had no teacher, not a classmate. We don't know the rules. We don't know anybody. don't know who to turn to. And many people, if they don't experience this, they don't even know that they will be able to survive. Katie had proved to herself over and over that she could survive. So people raising an eyebrow about her research, and that was small potatoes compared to what she went through just to get here. That life experience built her faith in herself. I always believe in myself, and it is as I'm telling, you know, everybody else is,

that you have to believe that with your hard work and perseverance, you can fulfill your dreams. Kati left Penn in 2013 when her stuff was thrown in the garbage can. And while academia was still largely sleeping on Drew and Katie's work, the pharmaceutical industry had taken note. As Katie was being pushed out, pharma companies were ramping up MRNA therapeutic research programs. Katty took a job at Biantec.

In 2018, they started working. on an MRNA flu vaccine with Pfizer. Then 2020 came, and we all know what happened. The breaking news, stay at home. That is the order tonight from four state governors as the coronavirus pandemic spread. We know the hospital surge is coming. We're very worried about every city in the United States. We keep getting to these grim milestones, Willie.

Immediately Biotech and the other pharmaceutical companies changed gears. They immediately knew that it is, oh, this is a pandemic. And, oh, 2,000 people. work here. Now this whole thing is now is making a vaccine. Tonight, the first doses of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine are on the move. It's the moment so many Americans have been waiting for after such a devastating year that's taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people across this country. It's astonishing when you trace this moment of COVID vaccine rollout to where it began,

to Drew and Katie's 2005 breakthrough, to the decades of gloveless speaker rinses that Katte did before that. And it's also kind of frightening to think that this world-changing scientific breakthrough relied so much on the extraordinary resilience of one person. You know, my mom and I both talked about this finish line and rowing. You're going backwards. You don't see the finish line, but you know you're going to get there eventually, and you know it's 2,000 meters. In science, that finish line can get pushed out. It can come in. And then you cross that finish line. You're like, I had a success, like her breakthrough. in 2005.

And then you're like, okay, we did it, we won. And then there's nobody there to cheer. And then fast forward, you know, 20-some odd years. And then they're like, oh, okay, here's your podium, you know. Dear professors Carri-Co and Wiseman, on behalf of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute, it's my great joy and privilege to convey to you our warmest congratulations. I invite you now to step forward to receive the Nobel Prize from the hands of His Majesty the King.

Did you expect to win a Nobel Prize? No, I never even dream. They said that every scientist dreams about it. I did not. How long did it take to sort of feel like reality? Not even today. It is just like kind of unbelievable for me. When she asked me to go, I started to start.

to cry. The joy I felt for her and for the, it was, you know, we all overcome obstacles in our life. And just to see someone that successful, knowing what she went through and knowing where she came from is, it's just a lesson. Her life is not fair. No, nowhere. Look, look around, politics, anything you look. Focus on what is in front of you, what you can change. And then you will have fun. The Leap is a production of The Hypothesis Fund. The show is hosted by me, Florida Lichten, and produced by Annette Heist, editing by Devin Taylor, Pajal Venge, and David Sanford. Fact-checking by Nicole Pesulka. Mixing and scoring by Emma Munger.

Music by Joshua Budo Carb. Thank you for listening. The sci-fi pot is back tomorrow with a conversation with a medical sculptor who makes lifelike replicas of body parts for health professionals to train on. And you can catch another episode in this series of The Leap next Monday. Here's a sneak peek. So yes, we wore on the volcano because we took a calculated risk that we needed to get additional information to tell us when the explosion is going to happen.

Talk me through the risks of going on to a erupting volcano. Like, what are the risks of that? Apart from dying. Well, how could you die? Tell me all the ways. Well, it's a really, really bad way. You don't want to miss it. That's next Monday.