The signs look very promising for the Hungarian scientist in the medical category. She would be the very first Hungarian woman to win a Nobel Prize.Continue reading
Katalin Karikó, who seems to be winning award after award, is now also on TIME magazine’s Most Influential People of 2021 list. She has been mentioned in the Innovators category.
The American news magazine published its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, including the Hungarian scientist. She is listed in the Innovators category alongside Elon Musk, for example.
Every person on the list has a short article written about them. An interesting aspect of this is that it is usually not written by a journalist. For example, another musician might write about a singer who has been listed or a fellow actor writes about another actor who is on the list. The same goes for Karikó. Her introduction was written by American biochemist, Jennifer Doudna, last year’s Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. She expressed her gratitude towards Karikó’s work.
“All of us who received the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines owe an enormous debt to Hungarian scientist Katalin Karikó, who spent decades defying skeptics in dogged pursuit of mRNA as a tool to fight disease,”
Editor-in-Chief and CEO of TIME, Edward Felsenthal, also wrote, referring to Doudna’s words when writing about the 2021 list.
Karikó is not the only Hungarian on the list. This year, Dorottya Rédai, Research Fellow of the Central European University’s Democracy Institute and project coordinator of the children’s book A Fairy Tale for Everyone, was also honored in the category of Pioneers.
Featured image: Katalin Karikó after receiving the Public media’s Man of The Year award in Hungary. Photo by Zoltán Balogh/MTI