This post was first published in the Wonderverse blog
One of my heroes of the current COVID-19 pandemic is the Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó. Coming from a very humble background, she decided to become a scientist and immigrated to the US to pursue her research. For years, Katalin struggled to find a permanent position, clinging on by her fingernails to research until only recently emerging as a COVID-19 vaccine superstar. Throughout her entire career Dr Karikó focused specifically on messenger RNA (mRNA), convinced that the molecule could hold the key to applications other than the ones it had been traditionally associated with (that is, carrying DNA information for the production of proteins). She is now one of the key scientists behind the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. If today we are turning the tide of the pandemic, we owe it to people like Dr Karikó.
But her story is not just an encouragement for those (like me) who struggle to climb the greasy pole of academic life! Commenting on Dr Karikó’s work, the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci, said that “she was, in a positive sense, kind of obsessed with the concept of messenger RNA”1.
The story made me reflect once more on the process of scientific discovery. I am convinced that, far from being a pure intellectual exercise, the whole scientific enterprise is profoundly intertwined with our humanity. In that respect, as American epidemiologist Theobald Smith puts it, “discovery (…) comes as an adventure rather than as the result of a logical process of thought”2.
Walking into a lab, a scientist brings with them a whole host of emotions, desires, drama, passion, faith, biases… For many of us that adventure starts with a moment of awe, when filled with wonder in the face of a phenomenon that captures our imagination, we perceive at once reality as “the most stubborn thing in the world”3 and as a precious mysterious gift to be unveiled.
When finally a hint of novelty emerges from the research, and reality has granted us something of itself, the moment of discovery is often accompanied by an experience of gratitude and joy.
That thrill is great even when the object of the discovery, seen from the outside, appears modest. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) describes it very well when, after having captured a new species of butterfly (Ornithoptera croesus) on Bacan Island in Indonesia, he writes:
“My heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting (…) so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause.”4
In a way I cannot help but smile, trying to picture the hairy British naturalist jumping with joy for having caught the poor creature. Yet, it is perhaps precisely that childlike wonder of Wallace as much as the “obsession” of Dr Karikó for mRNA that constitute the gateway to discovering reality and the true engine for knowledge and innovation.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html
[2] Theobald Smith, Letter to Dr. E. B. Krumhaar (11 Oct 1933), in Journal of Bacteriology (Jan 1934), 27, No. 1, 19.
[3] Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
[4] From Wallace’s 1869 book The Malay Archipelago
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