No one would have known Katalin Karikó if it weren’t for COVID. She was the lone warrior due to whom we got the COVID vaccine in record time. Because of her work on mRNA, she won the Nobel prize for physiology in 2023.

For decades, she stood almost alone. No one helped her. She didn’t even have any assistants to help perform her experiments. She was shunned by Universities, and was demoted and had to work from the smallest of labs throughout her career, because she didn’t bring in enough grant money. She never received tenure.

Till one fine day, she was kicked out because she didn’t bring in “sufficient dollars per net square footage” and she was not “faculty material.”

But yet she continued her research on mRNA. She became resourceful to get the job done, convincing private companies to let her work once Universities gave up.

There was a good reason why Karikó didn’t get any grants.

It’s because no one believed mRNA vaccines would work. mRNA are single strand molecules that carry a specific gene from DNA so the cell can make specific types of proteins. 

But working with mRNA was difficult because it would disintegrate extremely rapidly and were too unstable. On top of that, early trials showed that injecting mRNA in lab rats caused cytokine storms and inflammation that was so violent that it caused the rats to die very very quickly.

No big pharma giant was willing to touch it. No government agencies gave grants for it as well, because they all considered it a lost cause.

In fact, by 1995, Karikó had earned 40 rejections from various agencies that provide funding and grants!

But instead of giving up, Karikó used the 40 rejections as fuel to continue further. 

Karikó converted the rejections into her to-do list.

Every unfunded NIH grant or internal University grant came with a boilerplate rejection letter. But it also came with a page of reviewer comments where the reviewer gave their reason for rejection. Why they thought her research idea was foolish.

Instead of dumping the rejection letters, Karikó stapled them on the wall. And the reviewer notes became her blueprint – her task list. She would diligently solve every issue which the reviewers thought were insurmountable to make mRNA work.

One by one, she devised experiments till she achieved breakthrough. Protein output fades very quickly? She tested and compared different versions of modified mRNA for months. mRNA causes inflammation? She spent years researching what causes inflammation, and finally figured that swapping uridine for pseudouridine would eliminate the inflammation!

It was Karikó’s tenacity that got us the mRNA COVID vaccine.

But just slugging around butting heads on the same problem doesn’t solve the problem. It was Karikó’s puzzle solving ability. She was tenacious, but she was also creative. And came up with hundreds of modifications to her experiments. Came up with various novel solutions that no one else had tried before.

It all stemmed from her innate inquisitiveness. Karikó read voraciously. She would know about the latest research, not only in her field, but in completely unrelated different fields as well! That’s how she could combine novel ideas and create breakthroughs! That’s how she was never out of ideas when faced with failure.

Her biggest breakthrough came because she read about how tRNA in some obscure experiment did not cause inflammation. Which led her to modify specific nucleotides in mRNA to achieve the same!

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” – Joseph Campbell

To be a trailblazer means facing problems no one else has faced before. To solve new problems will require new ideas. You can come up with new ideas only if you read and learn widely. Tenacity requires curiosity to create new solutions.

When COVID struck, it was Karikó’s tenacity and curiosity over the years that led the way. It was her work that led to the fastest way to develop a vaccine. 

Action Summary:

• Don’t let rejections deter you. Make rejections your fuel instead. Gather rejections. Categorize them. And create a task list out of it. Prioritize the tasks based on how many people reject using similar reasons.