01/26/2026
“Rejection doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
An amazing immigrant story that is worth the read. Her research led to a vaccine that saved millions of lives, and a Nobel price. Amazing!
On her 30th birthday, a Hungarian scientist was fired. She smuggled her life savings in a teddy bear, moved to America, and spent 40 years being told her work was worthless. Then it saved the world.
January 17, 1985. Katalin Karikó turned 30 years old in Szeged, Hungary.
Her birthday gift arrived in an envelope: a termination notice. The Biological Research Centre where she'd worked since earning her PhD had lost its funding. Communist Hungary's collapsing economy was cutting science budgets. She was unemployed.
She had a two-year-old daughter named Susan and a dream nobody else believed in: that a fragile molecule called messenger RNA could revolutionize medicine by teaching human cells to make their own therapeutic proteins.
Karikó had grown up in Kisújszállás, a rural town of 10,000 with no running water or television. Her father was a butcher. Her mother was a bookkeeper. Neither finished high school. But they valued education ferociously, and their daughter loved science—especially watching her father butcher animals, marveling at how all those complex organs worked together to create life.
Now, at 30, with a biochemistry PhD and no job, she sent application letters to laboratories across Europe and America.
Temple University in Philadelphia responded. Professor Robert Suhadolnik offered her a postdoctoral position studying RNA. She accepted immediately.
But leaving communist Hungary wasn't simple. The government restricted currency export—citizens could take only $100 out of the country.
Karikó and her husband Béla sold their car, a Russian-made Lada, on the black market. They exchanged the Hungarian forints for British pounds—about £900, roughly $1,200. Then Karikó sewed the money into Susan's teddy bear.
In 1985, the family boarded a one-way flight to Philadelphia carrying everything they owned inside a stuffed animal.
They arrived with no safety net, no connections, no certainty. Karikó's starting salary was $17,000 a year. Béla, an engineer, took a job managing an apartment complex to help support the family.
At Temple, Karikó threw herself into RNA research. She worked relentlessly—sometimes sleeping in the lab, spending so many hours at her bench that Béla calculated she earned about $1 per hour.
But after three years, everything fell apart.
According to journalist Gregory Zuckerman's reporting, Karikó's supervisor at Temple reported her to immigration authorities, falsely claiming she was in the country illegally. She had to hire a lawyer to fight the deportation threat. During the legal battle, Johns Hopkins University withdrew a job offer.
By 1989, she found a position at University of Pennsylvania. Finally, she could focus on what she believed mRNA could do: deliver instructions to cells to produce therapeutic proteins—essentially turning the body into its own pharmacy.
The scientific establishment thought she was wasting her time.
mRNA was notoriously unstable—degrading almost instantly in laboratory conditions. When Karikó insisted the problem was contamination, not the molecule itself, no one listened. Other researchers had abandoned RNA entirely.
For years, she applied for grant after grant. Every application was rejected. In academia, grants aren't just funding—they're validation. Without them, you're invisible.
By 1995, University of Pennsylvania had seen enough. They gave her a choice: abandon mRNA research or accept a demotion.
That same year, her husband was stuck in Hungary with a visa problem. She'd just been diagnosed with cancer. And now Penn was forcing her off the tenure track.
She chose the demotion.
Her salary dropped below what her own lab technician earned. She lost her path to becoming a professor. She began wondering if she simply wasn't smart enough, wasn't good enough. She thought about leaving science entirely.
Then, in 1997, she met Drew Weissman at a photocopier.
Both were waiting to make copies. They started talking. Weissman, an immunologist, mentioned he was trying to develop an HIV vaccine. Karikó told him she could make any mRNA he needed.
He didn't dismiss her. He listened.
They began collaborating—two scientists working in obscurity on research nobody would fund, publishing papers nobody read.
The breakthrough came in 2005.
Karikó and Weissman discovered how to chemically modify mRNA—specifically, replacing uridine with pseudouridine—so the immune system wouldn't immediately destroy it. This single modification made mRNA usable for vaccines and therapies.
They submitted their findings to Nature. Rejected within 24 hours—a "desk rejection," deemed not even worth sending to reviewers. Nature called it an "incremental contribution."
They submitted to Science. Rejected.
They submitted to Cell. Rejected.
Finally, after multiple revisions and fighting with reviewers, the journal Immunity published their paper in 2005.
Almost no one noticed.
For years, the work sat largely ignored. The scientific community remained skeptical of mRNA technology. Funding continued to elude them.
By 2013, Penn had effectively pushed Karikó out. At 58, after nearly 25 years there, the university evicted her from her lab space and discarded her belongings. No American institution wanted her.
She took a job at BioNTech, a small German biotech company few had heard of. For nine years, she commuted between the United States and Germany, still conducting experiments with her own hands, still believing.
Then January 2020 arrived.
A novel coronavirus emerged in China. Within months, it was a global pandemic. Millions died. Economies shut down. The world desperately needed a vaccine—faster than any vaccine in history had been developed.
And suddenly, the "worthless" technology Katalin Karikó had spent her entire adult life perfecting became humanity's best hope.
BioNTech, working with Pfizer, used Karikó and Weissman's modified mRNA technology to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna did the same. Both vaccines showed over 90% efficacy—unprecedented for first-generation vaccines.
The vaccines were developed and approved in under a year. They saved millions of lives.
When Karikó learned the clinical trial results showed the vaccines worked, she celebrated alone in her kitchen by eating an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts.
On October 2, 2023, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
She was, colleagues noted, probably the first Nobel laureate who had never been a full professor. Someone "completely out of left field" who achieved one of science's greatest accomplishments.
When reporters asked how she persisted through four decades of rejection, her answer was characteristically simple:
"I felt successful when others considered me unsuccessful, because I was in full control of what I was doing. Why I didn't stop researching is because I did not crave recognition."
She wants young people, especially immigrants and women in science, to understand something crucial: rejection doesn't mean you're wrong.
"If my example helps them—because I was demoted, rejected, terminated, I was even subject to deportation at one point—if they just pursue their thing, my example helps them wear rejection as a badge."
She still has the teddy bear. The one that carried her family's entire future, sewn inside by a desperate mother who refused to abandon her dream.
That teddy bear traveled from communist Hungary to Philadelphia. It survived immigration battles, career humiliations, cancer scares, and decades of scientific rejection.
And in the end, the work that nobody wanted to fund became the technology that saved millions of lives during humanity's greatest modern health crisis.
Katalin Karikó didn't win because she was the smartest or best-connected. She won because she simply refused to stop working on what she knew was true, even when the entire world told her it was impossible.
Sometimes that's all it takes.
