Co-Nobel Prize winner and mRNA vaccine pioneer Katalin Karikó, an adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania was inducted to the Distinguished Daughters of Pennsylvania Class of 2024 Thursday by Governor Josh Shapiro at a formal ceremony at the Governor’s Mansion. This recognition commemorates Karikó for years of foundational basic science research that laid the path for mRNA vaccines and therapeutics, transforming the landscape of medicine, moving the world through an unprecedented pandemic, and saving millions of lives.
Distinguished Daughters of Pennsylvania, a program from the Foundation for Enhancing Communities, recognizes women who have made significant contributions to society in a plethora of fields, including science, education, the arts, and public service. Karikó joins an esteemed group of women whose legacies have shaped the commonwealth and beyond.
Apart from her Nobel Prize, Karikó’s tireless research pursuits and a do-it-yourself spirit have earned her a spot in Time’s People of the Year list, meetings with world leaders and royalty, and a collection of murals celebrating her in bustling cities around the globe.
A native of Hungary, Karikó is the daughter of a butcher and a bookkeeper. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Szeged before leaving the country, which was then part of the Soviet Union, to pursue new research and opportunities in Philadelphia in 1985. Since Hungarians were restricted from bringing large amounts of their money out of Hungary, she and her husband sewed much of their life savings into their daughter’s teddy bear and successfully snuck it out of the USSR. Karikó still resides in Pennsylvania today, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She still has the teddy bear.
Starting at the Perelman School of Medicine in the 1989, Karikó investigated the therapeutic potential of RNA and mRNA at a time when many considered the field to be fruitless. A now famous chance-encounter at a copy machine launched Karikó into a friendship and research partnership with Drew Weissman, the Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research at Penn. The pair’s different areas of medical expertise proved monumentally powerful when, together, they discovered how to modify mRNA to make it able to properly trigger protective immune responses. These breakthroughs in the lab led to a new and extremely effective vaccine platform, which was the foundation for BioNTech/Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA COVID vaccines.
Today, scientists worldwide, including Weissman and colleagues at Penn, are using the platform to design vaccines to prevent a host of hard-treat infectious diseases and even to treat sickle cell disease, food allergies, and cancers.
Karikó is the ninth recipient to come from Penn. Others include former University of Pennsylvania presidents Judith Rodin and Amy Gutmann, who also recently completed her tenure as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany; journalist Andrea Mitchell; communications scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson; emeritus trustee Susan Catherwood; former state representative Connie Williams; philanthropic leader Janet Haas; and nursing professor Neville Strumpf.
Along with her appointment at Penn, Karikó also serves as a professor at her alma mater, the University of Szeged.
