[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."