Yes. Of course, when we could see a car, once a week, we could see on the street. Then we run outside to see a car, of course. Everybody was walking, and half an hour to walk in the school. What happened, so many kids were there, and when you started to walk to the school, in the street, sooner, there will be another classmate, or other friend, and then finally 10 kids arrive in the school together. It was fun. It was a very, very nice experience. The school had many other activities. I remember elementary school, we already made crystals. In elementary school, I already competed in biology competition.

Actually, when I was 14 years old, in 8th grade, I was the third best in the country. Now, I just mentioned again that the competition was in Budapest, and we lived 150 kilometer away, and my father put on the train, and by myself, I went to Budapest, because they worked, and they couldn't get a week off, because actually, the competition was a whole week. It was just like, they send us a letter that somebody will be at the railway station, and it was, and they didn't know that whether I arrived, after one week later, I came back. It was like a different world. There were no cell phone in the '60s.

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.