“The best scientists,” says one who worked with her at Penn, neurosurgeon David Langer, “try to prove themselves wrong.”īut Langer left Penn, and Karikó - “Kati” to her friends - struggled to find another collaborator. She was forced out at Temple then, at Penn, she was passed over for promotion and tenure and nearly let go. After moving to the United States in her 20s, she worked in academia for decades, unheralded and unrecognized, always seeking funding for her vision of utilizing so-called messenger RNA to infiltrate the body’s defenses and induce the production of proteins that could coax it to heal. The daughter of a butcher, she was born in Hungary and decided early on that she wanted to be a scientist. It’s the heels-braced, dug-in-deep belief in yourself, in your own mind and its reasoning powers, that keeps you steadfast in the face of scorn and ridicule and failure. We despair at the likes of 9/11 truthers, Sandy Hook doubters and flat-earth believers: Why won’t they see what’s real and what’s not?īut there’s another kind of stubbornness, more rare and more lonely - the kind that saw Socrates convicted, got Galileo arrested, and cost Sir Thomas More his head. We despise Trump conspiratorialists who insist the election was rigged. We bemoan anti-vaxxers who won’t listen to reason. Bullheadedness gets a bad rap these days.
