Yes, so when I came home from lab many times, I carried the broken equipment, he had to fix it. Sometimes, I picked up from the hallway because somebody threw away a centrifuge or something, and I asked him whether he can fix it because even later, I didn't have funding, so he knows the PCR machine. He just always asks, "Is there AIDS on it?" I said, "No." Then he would do it, so he was fixing, sometimes came to help me and fix the CO2 incubator or other things, so he helped me, and I remember one time when I asked my husband and my daughter to sit down, it was 1993.

My daughter was, 11 years old. I said, "Sit down and listen. I have a great idea. I have to make circular RNA." Because, at that point I thought the grade only just from the end, and now I was just reading it will be very stable, and this is the solution, and my husband and my daughter remembers not other time, '93, I had the great idea, circular RNA. I wrote several grants in '93, '94. I already had rejected grants on circular RNA, people in these days, they said, "Oh, this is a novel idea." Anyway, so that was the time that, otherwise, I didn't bother my family with science.

I usually did not complain to my husband about the difficulties, which I might have because he is kind of person that when my daughter said something that some teacher, my husband said, "Oh, I will go and beat him up with a 2x4," or something, and then my daughter was immediately happy. Not that my husband violent at all, just even talking like that. He's very funny. My husband is a very funny guy. He was making so many jokes, and things, and practical jokes. He get this huge, plastic cockroach, and he put on the purse when he had money, so he knew that in the morning, I have to run to the store and get cash.

Then, I was screaming there, because when I touched it, it was like jumping. He just laughed at this kind of thing that he could scare me. He's a very funny guy.

Actually, I was always in Clinical Department, and there is no tenure for somebody with PhD. You have to be MD. And so, I could not be tenured in cardiology or the neurosurgery, because if I don't get the grant, I cannot operate on anybody. I cannot do anything.

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.