What I see is the problem, why people get burnout and why people are unhappy. What happens is at the beginning of your career, you want to understand something in science, and then you find something and you feel the urge to publish. Then you get a little fame, you want more paper, you want money, promotion, [unintelligible]. What happened, I could feel that it shifts, the people's goal became to get more power, and the more money, bigger team, and became this one, which was the goal before. The public, everything is a tool to reach that. When people are reading something that a competitor is doing, they get disappointed because their promotion or their something is out of the window. If you can preserve, like I did, I was always understanding the science. You will be happy if you see somebody's doing similar things what you have done. Maybe half of them what you already proved, but you didn't publish and you could say, "Oh, they scooped me."

You are happy because they even did more and you confirm what you are doing is valid and you are happy because you gain more knowledge. If I say that nobody believes that anybody could be happy to see somebody is publishing. If your goal is remain to better understanding and advancing science and not your ego, not your power, not your promotion, and– then you will be happy if you read somebody is publishing what you are doing. Yes. That's how– I could tell people could live the same life much happier if they would think differently.

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.