Encounter 35 · 35 of 42 · 1995
The grants refused
In 1995 a biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania was demoted after grant panels declined her messenger RNA work. The inflammation problem was real. The next year was not promised.
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
What didn’t work
The grants. The promotion. The reasonable institutional bet that this was not the future.
What they knew
- The molecule alarmed the immune system.
- The grants had been refused.
- The university’s incentives did not point at a molecule nobody could yet deliver.
What they could not know
- Whether the inflammation could be quieted at all.
- Whether anyone would fund the next year.
- Whether the bench would still be hers.
The situation
Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist, had been appointed assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. She argued that messenger RNA could be a therapeutic. Synthetic mRNA provoked inflammation. That was a real obstacle, not a misunderstanding. Grant panels mostly disagreed. In 1995, after repeated refusals, the university demoted her. She was never granted tenure.
Karikó arrived at Penn as an assistant professor in 1989. Messenger RNA as therapy was not a fashionable bet. The molecule she could make set off innate immune alarms. Reviewers had a point. After years of declined applications the university demoted her in 1995. She kept the work anyway.
1995
The demotion
Grants refused. Rank lowered. Inflammation unsolved. The next year not promised.
2005
A paper
Karikó and Weissman, Immunity: nucleoside-modified mRNA reduced innate immune activation.“Suppression of RNA recognition by Toll-like receptors,” Immunity 23 (August 2005): 165–175. Drew Weissman is a later colleague on that page. The paper did not make them famous. It made a method. Uses of that method in a later pandemic, and a 2023 prize, are not a 1995 secret.
1995 is not told as a hero’s origin. Persistence is not always virtue. The interesting fact is narrower: a method was pursued while the institutions that might have used it declined to.
What was at stake
A livelihood, a line of inquiry, and a demotion. Not a parable.
The next move
She kept making the molecule.
What they had
- A bench
- A stubborn molecule
- Refusal, which is information even when it is also humiliation
What happened
The refused years stayed refused while they were happening. She could have been wrong. Many people who are demoted are not sitting on a later method.
What if the refusal had been the whole story?
Private. No one else will see it.