Article

2020-12-20 Science & Technology

Katalin Kariko, the scientist behind the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine

[France24] The development of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, the first approved jab in the West, is the crowning achievement of decades of work for Hungarian biochemist Katalin Kariko, who fled to the US from communist rule in the 1980s.

When trials found the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to be safe and 95 percent effective in November, it was the crowning achievement of Katalin Kariko’s 40 years of research on the genetic code RNA (ribonucleic acid). Her first reaction was a sense of "redemption," Kariko told The Daily Telegraph.

"I was grabbing the air, I got so excited I was afraid that I might die or something," she said from her home in Philadelphia. "When I am knocked down I know how to pick myself up, but I always enjoyed working... I imagined all of the diseases I could treat."

Born in January 1955 in a Christian family in the town of Szolnok in central Hungary — a year before the doomed heroism of the uprising against the Soviet-backed communist regime — Kariko grew up in nearby Kisujszellas on the Great Hungarian Plain, where her father was a butcher. Fascinated by science from a young age, Kariko began her career at the age of 23 at the University of Szeged’s Biological Research Centre, where she obtained her PhD.

It was there that she first developed her interest in RNA. But communist Hungary’s laboratories lacked resources, and in 1985 the university sacked her. Consequently, Kariko looked for work abroad, getting a job at Temple University in Philadelphia the same year. Hungarians were forbidden from taking money out of the country, so she sold the family car and hid the proceeds in her 2-year-old daughter’s teddy bear. "It was a one-way ticket," she told Business Insider. "We didn’t know anybody."

Posted by Besoeker 2020-12-20 01:06|| || Front Page|| [11131 views ] Top

#1 I wonder how she feels about the new communism/socialism that is running like a deadly mental virus among the young people these days.

Posted by Unaitle Phert5103 2020-12-20 06:24|| 2020-12-20 06:24|| Front Page Top

#2 I thought the media has been pushing stories that the vaccine was the work of a 100% Wakandan team of scientists.

Posted by M. Murcek 2020-12-20 06:31|| 2020-12-20 06:31|| Front Page Top

#3 Source is French media, who've not yet adopted the Wakandan narrative

Posted by Javiling Dark Lord of the Munchkins1827 2020-12-20 06:37|| 2020-12-20 06:37|| Front Page Top

#4 Thank you Katalin

Posted by Mad Eye Angonter1301 2020-12-20 08:55|| 2020-12-20 08:55|| Front Page Top

#5 Success has many mothers and fathers. Failure, a father named Sleepy Joe.
The modern-day Curies: Meet the scientist couple behind 90% effective COVID-19 vaccine
Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sahin are rapidly becoming the most celebrated marriage in science since Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radioactivity.

The German-Turkish couple are on the brink of claiming the first effective coronavirus vaccine but, like their predecessors, they ride everywhere on bikes, are not interested in the billions of dollars they could make from their discovery and are happiest working together in their white lab coats, even on their wedding day. Like Marie Curie, they are immigrants, their parents both came to Germany from Turkey as part of the guest worker program, and they may yet share a Nobel prize after their company, BioNTech — along with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer — announced Monday their COVID vaccine is more than 90 percent effective.

Posted by Ulavirong Omeager2818 2020-12-20 15:46|| 2020-12-20 15:46|| Front Page Top

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