I studied, five years was to be a biologist. We studied plant and animal physiology, many different topics, if I think about just chemistry, physical chemistry, physics, mathematics. Mathematics was every day, and biochemistry, and colloid chemistry, it was so many different– organic chemistry, that was a killer, oh my God. We studied from early morning till late evening, we had lots of practices, and then we studied also on Saturdays, so Saturday was not off.

We lived in the same dormitory, we helped each other, we had to learn hundreds of names in Latin names, that was another killer, plants and the name of the plants, and animals, and the Latin name of all of the bones in the human body, and animal body. Yes, I still remember a couple of them, but it was–

We also learned genetics, and microbiology, and it was my more exciting things, because I want to work at this biological research center, which was owned by the Hungarian Academy of Science. I went there, and the only place there were opening is the lipid team. I mean lipid is a very boring topic, but I didn't care. I went there, that I will work in the whole summer when I was in the fourth year in the university, and the professor there, Tibor Farkas told me that, "Oh, you have a lot of rest of your life, you can work in the bench, in this laboratory," and he sent me to a fishery institute in Szarvas, this was like 80 kilometers away, and then I had to collect samples from fish, which was fed with different chow material material, and I had to collect them. When I returned, carry the samples, and during the academic year, we just analyzed them.

Dr. Katalin Kariko is a biochemist and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. She won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work in developing mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. She completed her schooling at the University of Szeged and carried out her post-doctoral work at the Institute of Biochemistry, Biological Research Centre of Hungary.

Dr. Kariko received her Bachelor of Sciences in Biology in 1978 and her PhD in Biochemistry in 1982 from the University of Szeged. She completed her post-doctoral work at the Institute of Biochemistry, Biological Research Centre of Hungary until 1985, when her lab at the Biological Research Centre lost funding. She then moved to the United States and carried out post-doctoral work at Temple University from 1981 to 1988 and at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences from 1988 to 1989. She then joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Perelman School of Medicine’s neurosurgery department in 1989.

At the University of Pennsylvania, she began to collaborate with immunologist Drew Weissman, where the two experimented with modifying mRNA. In the early 2000’s, Kariko and Weissman discovered that swapping uridine with pseudouridine in mRNA created a molecule with favorable attributes such as reduced adverse reactions. This breakthrough led the way for many other modified mRNA molecules to be potentially used in a multitude of future medical applications, including developing effective mRNA vaccines against the COVID-19 virus during the height of the pandemic in 2020. For their development of mRNA biotechnology, Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Outside of the Nobel Prize, Dr. Kariko has received numerous awards for her contributions to science including the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 2021, the Novo Nordisk Prize in 2022, being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2023, the Harvey Prize in Human Health in 2024, and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2025.