Katalin Karikó thought the call was a joke. It was 3 a.m. on October 2, 2023. Her husband answered the phone. As someone in building maintenance, “he quite frequently gets calls for fixing this and that,” Karikó says. But this time, he handed it over. “It is for you,” he said. Only half awake, she heard someone calling from Sweden to congratulate her: Karikó, a biochemist at the University of Pennsylvania, had won a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for her work on mRNA, a discovery that propelled the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines.
With that prize — the biggest in science, along with Nobels for chemistry and