Breaking Through with Katalin Karikó

From butcher's daughter in Communist Hungary to winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2023 — Katalin Karikó’s story is astonishing. I spoke to her about growing up in a state that offered excellent education and childcare as well as brutal oppression and secret police surveillance. And I asked her what it was like to move from Hungary to America, to persevere and to make a breakthrough that changed the world.

Katalin Karikó’s brilliant memoir Breaking Through: My Life In Science is out now in English and German.

1980: Katalin Karikó in a lab at the Biological Research Center in Szeged, Hungary.