Karikó’s Nobel: a moment of celebration or hard reflection?

It is the question of this year’s Nobel prizes: does the award to Katalin Karikó represent a long-awaited spark that will finally correct the decrepit biases in the structures and funding of academic science?

Or is it just one heart-warming story of a singular redemptive triumph of talent and determination in an imperfect but reasonably fair system for allocating scarce resources among a surplus of worthy research projects?

Professor Karikó and her colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Drew Weissman, won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work developing the mRNA technology that was used in Covid vaccines.

But while Professor Weissman has long been a professor of medicine at Penn, Professor Karikó has remained an adjunct professor, having been demoted by Penn in the 1990s and pushed out of her lab because of a lack of success in winning grant awards that many in academia suspect was tied to her being a hard-charging female immigrant.

At Penn, the hard reality of that debate is putting a major dampener on a moment that would be a decades-long highlight at many institutions.

“It’s like smashing the birthday cake,” said Elizabeth Heller, an associate professor of systems pharmacology and translational therapeutics at the Ivy League university. “We’re trying to celebrate, and instead we have to consider if that’s reasonable.”

Michael Eisen, professor of genetics, genomics, evolution and development at the University of California, Berkeley, said Penn and the rest of US higher education would be making a huge mistake if they focused on Professor Karikó’s story primarily as one of individual triumph and did not take time to reflect seriously on why she was treated so badly.

“The problem is that there’s so many other people, and so many other ideas, that are impaired by the practices of science, that aren’t magically fixed by her having won a Nobel prize,” he said. “She is a poster child for all the things that people suffer from in science – there’s misogyny, there’s xenophobia.”

Professor Karikó moved to the US in the 1980s after escaping from communist Hungary with some money sewn into her daughter’s teddy bear. At Temple University, she was threatened with deportation, before moving to Penn, where she was pushed out of her lab and had her salary cut while she battled cancer.

A chief problem for her career was the fact that her lab work was so embryonic that research funders, journal editors and institutional promotion committees did not anticipate its ultimate value.

“It is a clear moment of celebration,” said Benoit Bruneau, a professor of paediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, of Professor Karikó’s award, “but of course [it] also highlights the short-sightedness of science funders.”

“Her story is one of complete dedication to science, courage, resilience, passion and determination,” said Simona Cristea, head of data science at the Harvard University-affiliated Hale Family Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research. “It should also serve as a moment of reflection – on how we as a society can better support and incentivise scientists to immerse themselves in the creative scientific process.”

Professor Karikó’s saga does not allow any simple conclusions, said Richard Harland, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at Berkeley who is intimately familiar with decades of details of developing mRNA technology. Professor Karikó is absolutely deserving of the Nobel, Professor Harland made clear. Yet many researchers had contributed key advances to understanding mRNA and exploiting its uses in Covid vaccines, and more may yet be recognised for that by the Nobel committee, he said.

Such a complicated lineage means that even fair-minded scientific review panels of the 1990s could have had great difficulty weighing Professor Karikó’s ideas, Professor Harland said. “It is worth some navel-gazing to consider how grant panels could have done better,” he said. “Without the original documents, it’s hard to know.”

Professor Eisen acknowledged the possibility, but said hard experience had taught him that the more likely answer was that Professor Karikó “was penalised for being female and an immigrant from Eastern Europe, and that Penn’s actions were driven more by an instinctual desire to take advantage of her lack of leverage”.

Penn officials did not respond to questions about the university’s treatment of Professor Karikó or to Professor Eisen’s suggestion that it ought at least apologise to her.

Dr Heller questioned who could offer an apology so many years later, and said she saw no clear need for it. She also doubted the need for a formal investigation of Professor Karikó’s treatment unless the Nobel laureate herself asked for it, given that the time burden that would demand of Penn faculty “means people not doing their research”.

Perhaps later, Dr Heller acknowledged, some kind of exploration could be appropriate. “It’s just, we could have had that discussion any number of times over the past 25 years,” she said. “But we have to have it now, while we’re trying to celebrate.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com