A Penn official once told Katalin Karikó she was ‘not of faculty quality.’ Her work there just won a Nobel Prize

PHILADELPHIA — Every year, Katalin Karikó met with her University of Pennsylvania department chair to update him on her quest to treat disease with messenger RNA — fragile, inflammatory genetic molecules that were so difficult to work with that most scientists thought it was a waste of time. Every year, he listened to her passionate description of the science for a few minutes, then chastised her for not contributing to the department’s all-important metric: “dollars per net square footage” of lab space. The bottom line: Penn had rejected Karikó for a tenure-track position years earlier becaus...