Do we like Katalin Karikó?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up and there is real giving, with one contested chapter from her communist-era past.
Karikó is a Hungarian biochemist who got her PhD at Szeged in 1982. In 1985 she left communist Hungary after her research post was cut, and ended up in Philadelphia, first at Temple and then Penn. Her whole career was one long fight to keep working on messenger RNA when almost nobody thought it mattered.
Penn did not make it easy. In 1995, Fortune reports, her bosses told her to drop the research or take a demotion and a pay cut, and in 2013 she was out the door; she told Fortune she was “forced to retire”. Eight current and former colleagues told the student paper the university repeatedly shunned her work, while Penn's statement says it is grateful for her contributions. With Drew Weissman she cracked the problem in 2005, and the pair shared the 2023 Nobel Prize for it.
The one messy chapter is from 1978. A 2017 book by a former officer, László Bálint, reported she was registered by Hungary's state security, and Telex took it up in 2021. Karikó acknowledged she was recruited under pressure but said: “I did not harm anyone.” Historian Krisztián Ungváry said she refused written reports but did not deny oral ones, while the archive's director said the card alone doesn't show what she did and that she has no known work file. That leaves it contested rather than damning.
On the harm test, nothing nasty turned up: no conspiracy theories, no culture-war grifting, no dodgy company. Her loudest public stoush is with US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after his department cancelled about $500 million in mRNA contracts. She told the Telegraph it showed a “lack of respect for science”, and said “RFK Jr. is a lawyer who doesn't understand these issues.” She has also said mRNA vaccines carry side effects comparable to traditional ones. Honest gap: I found nothing from her on LGBTQ+ or trans people, good or bad.
Back in Hungary, the new Tisza government's health minister, Zsolt Hegedűs, confirmed she would sit on his advisory council. She said she'd do it unpaid, and only if he wanted her knowledge and experience rather than her name, stressing prevention. The opposition Our Homeland movement objected, with one lawmaker saying mRNA vaccines “made millions of people sick worldwide”. Johns Hopkins also announced she would give its 2026 commencement address and receive an honorary degree.
The giving is real. She has said she will donate more than half a million dollars of her Nobel prize money to Szeged, for outstanding teachers and students. Earlier she gave away the whole Debrecen Award for Molecular Medicine, and the dean there said she was the first winner to donate the prize money. That's a scientist putting her winnings back into the next lot of researchers.