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Half an hour outside of Philadelphia, in a modest suburban building, lives a strange, cheerful 65-year-old scientist who is a big part of people being able to throw off their masks next year.
Leading Dr .. Tallinn Kariko – who fled the US in 1985 at the age of 30 to communist-ruled Hungary hiding inside his 2-year-old daughter’s teddy bear – is not as powerful or prosperous as modern Stephen Bansal or Bioentech’s Ugur Sahin. That she has never been celebrated.
Artificial messenger RNA Research into obsession for 40 years, was long considered a boring dead-end. She said she was severely neglected, despised, fired, devalued, repeatedly denied government and corporate grants, and threatened with deportation – among other offenders.
Now, while others are making billions, if you ask her what her cut is, she rolls her eyes with a funny laugh and says, “Maybe 3 million.”
All along, however, Kariko stuck to his belief in mRNA, which has become the key to creating the complex technology behind the new vaccine developed by Modernna and Germany’s Bioentech (co-created with Pfizer).
Scientists say they could not have won the global vaccine race without it.
“Yeah, I was a little insulted, but now you can see I was right.” Kariko said smiling and joking in his posting room. “She is OK. I just love my work and I continue to believe in all its possibilities. I am just so happy that I lived so long to see the fruit of my work. “
Messenger ribonucleic acid, first discovered at Caltech in 1961, is called “the software of life”. Unlike other vaccines, which involve the injection of dead viral residues into the body, a vaccine that uses mRNA sends a set of instructions to fight disease in cells – and triggers. It has been described as a clean vaccine – and suggestions for preventing the spread of malaria and multiple sclerosis from cancer and stroke to covid and other diseases are clearly off the charts.
Nations of scientists, including many mRNA experts, have helped develop modern and bayonet tech vaccines. But it was Kariko – with the help of Drew Weissman, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania – who invented a method in 2005 to suppress the mRNA’s inflammatory response in the body.
That simple change paved the way for both Biontech and Moderna vaccines.
“I think he should win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry,” Derrick Rossi, one of the country’s leading nuclear biologists, told The Post. The vaccine, a former Harvard professor, ignored Kariko after it was published in 2005, but Watershed Research found, recognized its potential, and built on it when it founded Moderna in 2010. (He left the company in 2014.) “It’s a real deal.”
But with the news that both the Moderna and Bioentech vaccines were 95% successful in late-stage COVID-19 trials, Carico’s career was a long, ungrateful slog until she was deemed fit this month.
He will be forced to provide details but other scientists interviewed by the Post confirmed his claim that it was a very difficult time in the field of education.
“The [former] The president of Europe treated me horribly and at one point pushed me out of my lab, ”Kariko said. “It simply came to our notice then. He told me I could get a small office fee near the Animal House for my lab. “
Kariko said he told Penn’s new chairman to reinstate him to his former position after he could not be called “faculty material.”
UP did not respond to a request for comment on Kariko’s allegations of abuse.
“She’s not making any of it,” Rossi told the Post. “Her career went through some extraordinarily difficult times. But at the same time, Kate is not the best promoter and marketer of her own work. She tried to start her own company but failed, as she could not find the money to help her raise money. He is a scientist and does not fully understand the end of the business. “
Oddly enough, curry doesn’t look bitter – although its mega-beneficial vaccine pie team so far is very small. By contrast, companies such as Stephen Bansal, CEO of Moderna and Bob Langer, professor at MIT, and Tim Springer, professor at Harvard, as well as Ugur Sahin, owner of Bioentech in Turkey, became billionaires last month when share prices skyrocketed.
“Kate Carico is a superstar,” said Dr. John Kerry, chairman of neurosurgery at Lennox Hill Hospital. David Langer, Wrote on Twitter last week. “She was OK. I saw it and witnessed the morality and meditation of its supreme work and all that was to be done was right against all odds. He is very grateful to all of us. “
Kariko was asked to join the German company Bioentech as senior vice president, but The Post actively pointed out that his name was not even on the Bioentech website. He said, however, that as a result of his affiliation with Byantech, he could earn another થી 5 to 10 million at some point in the future.
Kariko spoke candidly with the uninterrupted light of humor during a two-hour social distance interview at a home she shared with her Hungarian engineer husband, Bella Francia, which was completed with a rowing machine in the living room and huge plants taken from the winter deck. Scattered throughout the house.
Although Kariko was scared of cancer years ago, he greeted a post-reporter and photographer wearing a mask but later removed it and kept it off during the interview. He said he plans to get a new vaccine and added, “No one should be afraid of it.”
Workholic Kariko, who rises every morning at 8 a.m. and still has a lab in her basement, prefers to walk on a rowing machine in her living room, her impressive touch in still heavy English, about nucleus sids. , Antigens, short and long RNA strands, proteins, cells and spikes.
She and her husband, who work both lives in the basement in their respective fields of work, are most proud of their 6’2 ″ daughter, Susan Francia, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in rowing. Francia, who started out as a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania and is now the university’s coach, inherits athletics from her parents. Catalin and Bella were both marathon runners.
Kariko (65) grew up in a one-room house with a sawdust and a refrigerator in the small town of Kisajsilis, 93 miles outside of Budapest. He got his first taste of science by carefully examining the carcass of a bloody pig slaughtered by his butcher father.
She said that when she first started university studies she always felt like she was lagging behind other students but eventually went on to win a key scholarship for advanced study of biochemistry in Hungary. He began focusing on mRNA in Hungary in 1978.
When she was offered a position at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1985 while she was studying MJNA, she and her husband, an engineer, sold their car on the black market for 1, 1,200 after she was fired from the CZ Biological Research Center. . Susan’s teddy bear. It was illegal to take cash from the country.
Kariko joined the University of Pennsylvania as a professor in 1990 and immediately began applying for a grant to help with the study of mRNA but was repeatedly denied. Her fortunes changed in 1998 when she met and started working with immunologist Drew Weissmann in UP.
Kariko was given positions in both Moderna and Biontech but she chose Biontech in 2014 because she prefers Sahin and his wife to Moderna’s controversial CEO BNcell.
Carico said Bansal’s men told him he could be fired at the moment’s notice if he signed with Moderna – and that he would not be able to work for a rival company for two years.
“You can imagine,” he said, smiling again. “It was my invention that helped his company become what it was, but this was the deal he offered me. No thanks. ”
What could she do with her 3 3 million wind and more likely, Kariko shakes her head.
“I like what I have and where I live and what I do. I am busy every day. Nothing will change. ”
Moderna did not return calls from the post.
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