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A Hungarian and American duo won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine Monday for discoveries that enabled the development of the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19, which saved millions of lives during the pandemic.
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman made “fundamental discoveries” along the path to create the vaccines, said Rickard Sandberg, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
Born in Hungary, Karikó went to work in the United States to pursue science in the 1980s. But she struggled to win grants at the University of Pennsylvania and her funding dried up quickly, the institute said.
There she met Weissman of Massachusetts, and worked with him on vaccines that could get past the body’s defenses, all the while prompting an immune system response that would make enough antibodies to fight the disease.
But their work went largely unnoticed for decades.
“They really didn’t care about it. And it wasn’t until around 2008, 2009 when people started to see the potential,” Weissman told NBC News in 2021.
When asked about a potential Nobel prize, Karikó, who’s now a professor at Sagan’s University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told NBC News in 2021, “I focused always on the work and that’s what excites me.”
The two scientists were “overwhelmed,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Assembly when he contacted them about the news before the announcement.
The prize is among the most prestigious in the scientific world and is selected by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.
It also comes with a prize of 11 million Swedish crowns (about $1 million).
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