The University of Pennsylvania, where Kariko was on track for a professorship, decided to pull the plug on her when her grant rejections piled up.

"I was up for promotion, and then they just demoted me and expected that I would walk out the door," she told AFP in an interview from her home in Philadelphia in December 2020.

Kariko didn't yet have a green card and needed a job to renew her visa. She also knew she wouldn't be able to put her daughter through college without the hefty staff discount.

She decided to persist as a lower-rung researcher, scraping by on a meager salary.

It was a low point in her life and career, but "I just thought...you know, the (lab) bench is here, I just have to do better experiments," she said.

Now, her pioneering work—which paved the way for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines—has won her the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
#NobelPrize #medicine #nobel #mrna #Kariko 
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-10-katalin-kariko-scientific-maverick-paved.html