Katalin Karikó said that when she won a Gairdner Award in 2022 for co-discovering the foundations of mRNA vaccines, which have saved millions and maybe even billions of us from dying of COVID.
On the bell curve of grit and redemption, it’s hard to find a more exemplary case than the Hungarian immigrant woman who was treated shabbily for years by her employer, the University of Pennsylvania, and last year ended up winning The Nobel Prize.
The search for new truths in science is possibly the hardest search of all, because the bar of evidence is so high. Yet years ago, when I heard that a Canadian had won a Gairdner for pioneering the concept of ‘evidence-based medicine’, I asked my physician wife why there’s even an award for that. Isn’t all medicine “evidence-based?” To which she laughed and laughed, the way one does with an especially naïve child, and said: “Darling, it’s tradition-based!”
Oh.
So what kind of people are best suited for the long, lonely struggle of taking on the world, knowing you’re right and it’s wrong, and also knowing that God sides with the big battalions?
Women for sure. For reasons good and ill, they have been trained for centuries to endure.
It helps if you’re an immigrant as well, and these days Canada especially is not just a nation of immigrants, it’s the nation of immigrants.
But it takes a self-confidence bordering on obsession to persist in the face of constant defeat, which Dr. Karikó did for nearly her entire career as a research scientist. This has often been called ‘grit’, a quality much in vogue today, though I suspect with many more advocates than practitioners. Indeed, the times are against people who will tolerate ‘bosses’ who make them miserable, let alone who thank them for teaching them how to succeed.
What I think sets Dr. Karikó apart is a heroic capacity for hard work.
I once heard Sir Edmund Hillary talk about summiting Everest. He began by saying: “I was born on a farm in New Zealand and I learned the value of hard work.”
So I was struck many years later by what Katalin Karikó said about her childhood.
“How did I go from a simple life, from a single room, no running water, no television, no refrigerator to all this…?
“I grew up the daughter of a butcher and a bookkeeper in a small village….and I learned from my parents that hard work is a part of life…and I learned how to make sausage.”
“I was just a curious girl, who was fascinated with all the animals in our yard and wanted to learn more about all of these living things. I didn’t know a single scientist. But I was 16 years old and I wanted to be one.”
“I was not successful. I was demoted. I never received a single grant.”
“But I had a message. It doesn’t matter the skepticism around you. What matters is, you believe you can achieve.”
At the Gairdner Award ceremony in Toronto in 2022, she thanked her mentors, her parents, her husband and her daughter Susan Francia, who won two Olympic Gold medals in rowing. She then singled out for special thanks those people who tried to make her life miserable.
“Those people who demoted me from my position, who fired me, they made me work harder and improve myself and without them, I wouldn’t be here.”
In 1995, she was told by the University of Pennsylvania to abandon her research or face demotion and a pay cut.
She kept working. She was demoted and her pay was cut.
She suffered in silence and kept working.
Ten years later, she asked to be reinstated to a faculty position and was initially denied because she was “not of faculty quality.” Faculty who’d been demoted couldn’t be promoted back to the faculty track. By 2013, she found all her belongings packed, moved, and misplaced at the direction of a superior. She was then forced to retire because of her relentless pursuit of mRNA vaccine research.
When she said she would leave to join the startup BioNTech, her colleagues at Penn, where she never made more than $60,000 a year, laughed and said, “BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.”
She then joined BioNTech, becoming senior vice president in 2019.
Today, BioNTech is worth $19.2 billion.
Earlier this year. Dr. Karikó donated more than half a million dollars she received from her Nobel Prize to her former alma mater, the University of Szeged in Hungary, where she got her PhD in Biochemistry in 1982, and in May she was appointed as a University Professor.
Meanwhile…
1. Dogs and hotdogs. You know that look.
Next, for $150,000 you can own a dog who’s a gentle companion who can rip out an attacker’s throat. As one happy owner said: “I feel like we have a gentle Navy Seal in the house.”
Then, how many hotdogs can people eat? Last week Patrick Bertoletti swallowed 58 hot dogs in 10 minutes to win the annual Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest on Coney Island in New York.
And… this just in!… Joey Chestnut, who’d won 16 of the last 17 years’ contests and who entered another contest this year, ate nearly the same number of hot dogs in half the time.
Dental hygiene student (yup) Miki Sudo won her 10th women’s title and set a new world record by downing 51 links.
2. Fresh new grounds. Top European cities for coffee. Breaking a 900-year-old glass ceiling. The earliest versions of GPS. What happens when you swallow a robot? Plus, honest food labels.
3. Obituary for a doomed politician. Not Joe Biden. Not Justin Trudeau, but Rishi Sunak, Britain’s former Prime Minister, whose background, actions and attitude have odd parallels to Canada’s PM.
Plus…never forget, “they work for you.” As John Naughton pointed out “… mySociety is a terrific example of public-interest technology. It provides digital tools that make it easy for British residents to communicate with, and monitor, their public representatives. One of these is their “They Work for You” service, which makes it easy to find your MP and send an email to her or him.” When will this come to Canadians?
4. Seven prodigies. We all like to think our kids are brilliant. But Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason’s really are. As The Times noted: “The Nottingham academic is the mother of seven children between the ages of 15 and 28 who have become a fixture in British cultural life; indeed, it is hard to know how the UK’s orchestras, concert halls and festivals would get by without them.”
Plus one more: Spanish soccer superstar, Lamine Yamal whose goal against France this week changed the face of the game. Lamal is 16 and still wears braces.
5. Could you live without the internet? Digital exclusion means no access to doctors’ appointments, travel directions, job applications, benefits forms, school scheduling and key services. Here in Canada, with 94.3% internet penetration, that still leaves 2.3 million of us out in the cold.
6. Are these sad times better in happy cities? And what even is a happy city?(Toronto ranks #230 out of the 250 cities on the list); Aarhus Denmark, #1; and Johannesburg #250). So here’s Gene Kelly on how to be happy again. And Donald O’Connor on making us laugh.
7. How to cut off your nose. Baillie Gifford is the British investment firm who’s sponsored dozens of literary festivals, as well as the annual Baillie Gifford Prize for the best non-fiction book in the English language (it was won last year by Canadian John Vaillant, and two of its top prize winners over the past 25 years are Canadians Margaret MacMillan and Wade Davis).
But Baillie Gifford invests in Israeli companies and in fossil fuels, so the Hay Festival and Edinburgh Festival ‘uninvited’ them, despite the fact that Hay is actually 30 festivalsaround the world, and the relationship with Edinburgh began in 2004. Then Baillie Gifford decided to cut its funding to the nine other British literary festivals it supported. The headline on all this wins no prizes for surprise: “Literary festivals previously funded by Baillie Gifford launch joint appeal for support.”
Meanwhile, there is a new book festival that needs no financial support. It’s the second annual Queen’s Reading Room Festival at Hampton Court Palace hosted last week by Queen Camilla. Everyone was there.
8. I don’t see any ad campaigns for male rugby players in their underwear. And I don’t think we’ll be seeing any more for female rugby players any time soon, either. BlueBella’s campaign was attacked for being ‘regressive.’
Speaking of fake beauty, here’s how Jeremy Allen White gets rid of his tattoos every day on the set of The Bear. Meanwhile, L’Oreal’s zeitgeist foray includes a beguiling essay on ‘the lipstick effect,’ the natural hair movement and cosm’ethics.
9. What’s the most famous building in the world? In the top three on every list is the Sydney Opera House which last year celebrated its 50th anniversary, and last month won a Grand Prix in Cannes for the 4-minute film celebrating its Golden Anniversary. The film is called “Play it Safe”, which the Opera House rarely has, especially its building.
And the most famous cube in the world? Rubik’s Cube, of course, which also turned 50 this year. Invented by Hungarian aircraft designer Ernő Rubik in 1974, it has sold over half a billion units, and the record for its ‘time to solve’ in speed-cubing contests has fallen from 22.95 seconds in 1982 to the current world record of 3.47 seconds.
And the most famous political biography in the world? A strong candidate is The Power Broker, by Robert Caro, published 50 years ago last week. “Surely the greatest book ever written about a city,” it’s the 1,200-page story of Robert Moses, the unelected king of New York in the mid-1900’s. The New York Historical Society will have an exhibit on the author, the book, the subject and the anniversary.
10. A bird gets sucked into the jet’s engine. Then what happens? Also, how to animate your heart. Plus, how to exercise our minds like we do our bodies. And where to send your kid to college. And finally, making s’mores with less.
11. What I’m liking. I like kids’ books more than adult books because they feed my enormous inner child. If yours needs a little nourishment, rush to get Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. Who he?
He was an American architect who, in his spare time, wrote magical stories about words and numbers that are on a par with Alice in Wonderland, Where the Wild Things Are, and even Harry Potter.
For example, one character is The Whether Man, “not the Weather Man, for after all it’s more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be.” Exactly!
Memorable reading, and listening, like this.
12. Last week, This Week. Lots of readers commented on my thoughts on Joe Biden and old age. Which begs the question: “So how does it feel to be old?” David Friedman, Milton’s son, offers the best description I know.
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JOIN US IN GREECE THIS OCTOBER FOR A TRIP THAT WILL EXERCISE YOUR BODY – AND MAKE YOUR HEAD HURT
For the past two years, Jean and I have gone bicycling on the west coast of Greece in October, and in that week have also enjoyed one of the world’s most enjoyable and secret literary Festivals.
We are doing it again this year from September 30 through October 8. We can take 16 friends and there’s room for three more as of now. First come, first served.
Here’s all the trip details, and the festival and speakers.
Please let me know quickly (bob@ramsayinc.com) if you want to enjoy a magical week in Greece, when the weather is as lovely as the food, the wine, and most of all, the people.
Onward,
Bob