Katalin Karikó, an Abington resident and 2023 Nobel Prize laureate, was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among other outlets, for the University of Pennsylvania’s about-face regarding her research now that she and her colleague Dr. Drew Weissman are an international headline.

Karikó, an adjunct professor of neurosurgery at Penn, and Weissman, a professor of vaccine research in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, first published their landmark research in 2005, but according to The Journal, Forbes and The Philadelphia Inquirer, Penn had previously rejected Karikó for a tenure-track position because she failed to secure funds for her research.

Forbes wrote, “the university reportedly offered Karikó a choice to either leave or be demoted with a pay cut in 1995 … because her mRNA research was deemed too risky and did not attract enough grant funding.”

Karikó discusses her journey in Breaking Through: My Life in Science, an autobiography that comes out on Tuesday.

“I was told that I was ‘not of faculty quality,’” she wrote. “I was learning that succeeding at a research institution like Penn required skills that had little to do with science. You needed to know how to do things in which I have never had any interest (flattering people, schmoozing, being agreeable when you disagree, even when you are 100% certain that you are correct).”

Penn’s licensing deals for Weissman and Kariko’s technology have generated more than $1 billion in royalties for the university. More than 665 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered in the United States since 2022.

Eric Feigl-Ding, chief of Covid Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute and former Harvard Medical School researcher, said the following:

?UPENN needs to apologize to #NobelPrize2023 winner Dr. Kariko: “UPenn told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality. When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.’”@Penn — apologize! pic.twitter.com/LgoTKgUi6j

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) October 2, 2023

Nicole Paulk, founder of Siren Biotechnology, said the following: 

And yet you shunned her and put roadblocks in the way of her and her research when she was at Penn. You should feel immense shame, not pride, today. You played no role in this. This win is hers and Drew’s.

— Dr. Nicole Paulk (@Nicole_Paulk) October 2, 2023

“The University of Pennsylvania demoted Katalin Karikó, cut her pay and shunted her lab to the outskirts of campus,” The Journal said in an X.com post on Wednesday.

“We couldn’t get funding, we couldn’t get published,” Weissman told The Philadelphia Business Journal. “We couldn’t get people to notice RNA as something interesting. … We never gave up. We kept persevering and working on it.”

According to The Inquirer, when asked whether Karikó should have been granted tenure, the university responded with this statement:

“Dr. Katalin Karikó and Dr. Drew Weissman are outstanding scientists, whose discoveries helped pave the way for developing the life-saving vaccines deployed in the global fight against COVID-19. The recognition of their important work with the Nobel Prize is deeply deserved. We acknowledge and are grateful for the valuable contributions Dr. Karikó has made to science and to Penn throughout her time with the university.”

To pre-purchase a copy of her book, you can click here. For our previous coverage on Kariko’s Nobel Prize, you can click here.

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Photo: University of Pennsylvania Medicine