Breaking Through

June 1, 2023

In Breaking Through, biochemist Karik� explains how her research (and longtime perseverance as both a scientist and an immigrant from postwar Hungary) led to the COVID vaccine. Prepub Alert.

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August 15, 2023
A fine memoir from a biochemist whose decades of work contributed to the formulation of the Covid-19 vaccine. In this inspiring, riveting narrative, Karik� describes the science behind her work but also delves deeply into her childhood, education, and bumpy career. She was born in Hungary in 1955. Devastated by World War II and under communist rule, the country was impoverished, as was her family, living in a poorly heated adobe hut. Nonetheless, it was a loving family, and her butcher father always provided. The author beings with a scene in which she watches, fascinated, as her father dismembers a pig. Curious and hardworking, Karik� excelled in school. It may be surprising for some readers to learn that in this communist nation, teachers encouraged her, and the government showered her with honors and smoothed her path into a university and a research position. Ironically, moving to America in 1985 gave her more opportunities but less freedom and no prosperity. She found American academic research fiercely hierarchical, overly competitive, preoccupied with money and publication, and often simply nasty. She also found it cheaper to send her daughter to relatives in Hungary for long periods than pay for American child care. Karik� survived through stubbornness, exquisite precision in her experiments, and success in perfecting a fragile molecule, messenger RNA, to treat disease. For more than three decades, she labored with support from a few scientists but not her university employer, who denied her tenure or a permanent job. It was only after she was forcibly "retired" in 2013 that entrepreneurs began taking mRNA seriously. She became a celebrity in 2021 when pharmaceutical companies using her discoveries won the race to produce Covid-19 vaccines. Developing a new vaccine had never taken fewer than four years; creating one with mRNA succeeded in less than one. An outstanding memoir with a happy ending.

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August 21, 2023
Hungarian American biochemist Karikó, whose research was instrumental in the development of mRNA vaccines for Covid-19, details her life and career in this captivating debut memoir. While growing up in a one-room house in post-WWII Hungary, Karikó found deep communion with the outdoors—her family grew their own food, and she was fascinated by the teeming animal ecosystems just beyond her backyard. A middling student, she oriented herself toward science (“What I lacked in natural ability, I could make up for in effort”). In college, she received a fellowship to Hungary’s prestigious Biological Research Center; she felt like “a fish out of water amid powerful people” there, but her studies led her to become fascinated by the function of mRNA, a single-strand nucleic acid that instructs cells to build proteins. In the mid-1980s, she came to America as a postdoctoral fellow to continue her research on mRNA, fighting an uphill battle to be taken seriously (both as a woman and due to skepticism about mRNA’s importance) before her findings became crucial during 2020 vaccine development campaigns. Karikó describes her research with a palpable sense of wonder (“Every cell is like a sci-fi city that never sleeps”), successfully distilling complex scientific matters. The result is the rousing story of a remarkable woman and her lifesaving contributions to medicine. Agent: Mollie Glick, CAA.