In praise of Katalin Karikó

Finished Paxlovid this morning. Tested this evening, and the test reads “Negative,” so hooray for that. I know I may continue “shedding virus” for a while, and I know there is some danger of a Paxlovid Rebound. I will be careful, mask, avoid close contact with others, and not come near people (like Margie) who are extremely vulnerable. But I’ll be able to spend some time with my friend Patricia outdoors (the forecast says it won’t be raining), and maybe by the weekend I can visit Sue again.

But here’s what I want to talk about: Katalin Karikó. awarded the Nobel Prize this morning. 

I want to talk about the slim odds that such a woman, whose “family lived in a single room with a reed roof [are we talking thatch?], no running water, no refrigerator and no television” should be able to blossom as she did. Her mother was a bookkeeper, her father a butcher. Slim odds that she could achieve a scientific breakthrough by the time she was 68; could save all the lives she has saved including, now, mine. Because had I had this thing in 2020, I’m pretty sure I’d be dead now. 

She was discouraged, ridiculed, dismissed. People said nothing would come of her research. She has a husband who presumably helped out. She has one daughter, an Olympic athlete. She has one colleague who believed in her, with whom she’ll share the prize. But she had to be so curious that she was driven to continue the work, no matter how they laughed at her. She had to believe in herself and what she thought she knew. She had to not give up.

I am posting a picture of a blurry photograph that hangs in my hallway. Four women, a matrilineage, all women who craved education, who loved to read and were fierce with curiosity, who were discouraged, demeaned, and ridiculed for presuming they were good enough to be educated. The one in the chair was 73 when the photo was made. She went to Normal School, as teachers college was called then, and she taught for two years; but when she married she had to quit teaching, and her husband said there was no point in women reading. “Get rid of your books,” he told her. “You won’t have time for them now.” She converted a corner of her kitchen pantry into a small library with a comfortable chair, several shelves of books, writing journals, and a reading lamp. As her husband and her sons never entered the kitchen, her secret library was safe. Only her daughter knew about it. 

That’s her daughter to our left, 45 when the photo was made. She also went to Normal School, but she married right after she graduated, and married women weren’t allowed to teach, so she never got to practice her profession. During Roosevelt’s WPA, she became a supervisor of school lunch rooms, which was an irony because she was a terrible cook. She wanted her daughter to have all the education she could get. That’s her daughter, age 21 at the time of the photo, holding the baby. 

Her daughter went off to Greensboro Women’s College and did well enough to transfer to Duke University, where she was majoring in microbiology until she became pregnant by a man who was just passing through, training to be a Marine medic. Unmarried women who became pregnant were automatically expelled from Duke in 1944, so that ended her education.

The baby is me, 2 months old in the photo. I was 42 when I finished my Ph.D. in Theatre, and I can tell you that everything Katalin Karikó says in that article I linked above is true to my experience of academia. “It is not exclusively men that prioritise power over progress,” she concedes, but “they have had more time to practise wielding power.” 

So I see her as a hero. I praise her persistence, her intelligence, her patience with academic egos and turf wars. I praise her nerve, her research, and the fruits of her research: those “jabs” that keep us alive when we get this virus. I praise her.