In this episode of pplpod, we profile Katalin Karikó, the Hungarian-American biochemist whose decades of resilience laid the scientific groundwork for the mRNA vaccines that helped contain the COVID-19 pandemic. We trace her incredible journey from growing up in a home without running water in Hungary to immigrating to the United States in 1985, smuggling her family's life savings inside her daughter's teddy bear.

We explore how Karikó persisted despite facing rejection and skepticism from the scientific community, including a 1995 demotion by the University of Pennsylvania, where her work on mRNA was underfunded and deprioritized. Listeners will learn about her pivotal collaboration with immunologist Drew Weissman; together, they discovered how to modify mRNA nucleosides to suppress immune respons ...