The Year of the Unexpected

When looking back at it, 2020 won’t be considered a good year for the world but could turn out to be a fruitful one for a Hungarian scientist.

A year ago, in December 2019, no one suspected that the just discovered ‘Chinese pneumonia’ cases would spread worldwide and ignite the COVID-19 epidemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2, better known as the new coronavirus. At the end of January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ and then, a pandemic in March. Countries began to take preventive actions, like travel restrictions.
In Hungary, a law on protection against the epidemic entered into force by which the government was authorized to take measures by decree, even without parliamentary authorization. Some of those measures – along with new ones like a night curfew and mandatory mask wearing in public places – are still in place but, unfortunately, this week, the number of fatalities related to the new coronavirus infection in this country exceeded 8,000, which is one of the worst figures worldwide per 100,000 inhabitants.

Hungarian candidate for Nobel Prize
Help is on the way, though, as vaccination is reported to start in Hungary before the end of the year. And the fact that there is a vaccine already available is due in large part to the research activities of a Hungarian biochemist, Katalin Karikó.
25 years ago, the Biological Research Center in Szeged, S Hungary, had to dismiss staff, including Katalin, due to lack of sufficient funding. She successfully applied for a job at Temple University in Philadelphia in the United States. At that time, a Hungarian citizen was only allowed to take no more than USD 50 out of the country, so, Katalin and her husband sold their Soviet-made family car, changed the proceeds on the black market to US dollars and hid the some USD 1,200 in their daughter’s teddy bear for the journey.
Katalin Karikó’s main interest had long been research on the genetic code RNA (ribonucleic acid) that gives cells instructions on how to make proteins. However, in the 1980-90s, research into RNA attracted criticism because the body’s immune system sees it as an intruder, meaning that it often provokes strong inflammatory reactions and scientists focused on DNA research instead. It was in 1997 that she met immunologist Drew Weissman. They decided to collaborate to develop a way of allowing synthetic RNA to go unrecognized by the body’s immune system. Eventually, they succeeded in placing RNA in lipid nanoparticles, a coating that prevents them from degrading too quickly and facilitates their entry into cells. Since this patented method has been used by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to develop their vaccines, introducing genetic instructions into the body to trigger the production of a protein identical to that of the coronavirus, thereby eliciting the desired immune response, Katalin Karikó’s name – along with that of Drew Weissman – is now often mentioned as the possible winner of the next Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
That – unlike a pandemic a year ago – would not be unexpected…