The Wistar Institute Honors Nobel Laureate Dr. Katalin Karikó with 2024 Helen Dean King Award

In front of the 200-plus audience gathered in The Wistar Institute’s standing-room-only Sarah and Matthew Caplan Auditorium — as well as many more tuning in virtually — the 2023 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., received a scientific distinction, this prize a little closer to home: Wistar’s Helen Dean King Award, bestowed each year in the memory of prominent geneticist and the Institute’s first female scientist Dr. Helen Dean King.

Upon her introduction from Wistar’s Dr. Maureen Murphy, deputy director of the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center and Ira Brind Professor, Dr. Karikó delivered her lecture: “My journey to develop mRNA for therapy.”

In her presentation, Dr. Karikó spoke of the road she followed on her way to the Nobel Prize. Starting in childhood competitions in local science fairs in her small Hungarian town, she learned to roll with the punches of the scientific method’s trial and error, channeling frustration into determination, which ultimately led her to Philadelphia — where her indefatigable enthusiasm for research (honed by daily 6-km pre-research jogging sessions) led her to pursue mRNA’s potential.

While at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Karikó (now famously) met her soon-to-be collaborator at the copy machine: Dr. Drew Weissman would go on to share the 2023 Nobel Prize with Dr. Karikó. Together, they refined mRNA immunization technology into an effective elicitor of immune response, with their findings on mRNA’s effectiveness against cancer and influenza published in the 90s.

As she details in her bestselling memoir, Breaking Through: My Life in Science, these results, however promising, struggled to attract attention and funding. Dr. Karikó persevered through years in a scientific wilderness at the periphery without grant funding but with a whole lot of scientific freedom. The global emergency of COVID-19 and the frantic search for an effective vaccine led to the emergence of her and Dr. Weissman’s technology as the basis for the world-famous mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 — which were essential to stemming the tide of disease around the world.

But this hard and often frustrating work did not discourage her, she said — because Nobel Prize or not, she loves the call of research, a message she made sure to emphasize to the scientists and scientists-in-training in the audience.

“This is what I find most important: you have to be happy,” she said. “You have to enjoy what you are doing. If you want to follow instructions, do not become a scientist. If you want to make a lot of money — well, then I don’t know where to go,” she quipped, to a big laugh.

“But if you want to solve problems — and if you enjoy solving problems — this work is for you. You will get better and better at it because you love it.”

Following her talk, Dr. Ami Patel, assistant professor in Wistar’s Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center, presented Dr. Karikó with this year’s Helen Dean King Award, to thunderous applause. But Dr. Karikó wasn’t done: she pulled out her phone to photograph her audience and capture the moment. A line of attendees clutching her book for signatures & selfies formed with the willing and amiable Nobel Laureate; it was a very long line.