How one woman's dream changed the world

As I said last week, “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

Shortly after writing that blog post, I read an article in The New York Times about a woman named Katalin Karikó, whose dream has changed our world for the better: she pioneered messenger RNA (mRNA), creating the basis for the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines, which were more effective than traditional vaccines and able to be brought to market more quickly than anyone expected.

Dr. Karikó spent years working “at the bench” to develop mRNA that could be introduced into the human body to direct cells to respond in certain ways. Along the way, she was lucky to find some colleagues who embraced her vision. She had tremendous difficulty gaining funding and support, because her dream—her goal—was so out of the box that the organizations that provide research grants didn’t want to fund it.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Eventually she left the academic setting to join a company called BioNTech.

In January of last year, the genetic sequence of COVID-19 was identified by researchers in China; within hours of that sequence being shared, BioNTech (where Karikó now works) designed its mRNA vaccine. It eventually became the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. Moderna designed its mRNA vaccine within two days.

Testing of the vaccines took months, and lots of data collection. In November, 2020, when the results of the BioNTech vaccine trials came in, Dr. Karikó turned to her husband and said, “Oh, it works. I thought so.”

My favorite paragraph of the entire Times story is:

“To celebrate, she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts. By herself.”

If you can dream it, you can do it.

As a young girl in Hungary, Dr. Karikó dreamed of becoming a scientist, though she had never met one. She accomplished that dream through her studies.

While in her 20s, she and her husband immigrated to the United States, where she developed her dream of creating mRNA. She persevered despite lacking tenure or consistent funding. She kept going, year after year, despite not making all that much of a salary.

If you are familiar with the stories of other female scientists, from Marie Curie to Nettie Stevens to Barbara McClintock to Rosalind Franklin and more, then much of Dr. Karikó’s story won’t surprise you. Many of them are women who lived almost entirely for their work, often without the funding and respect they deserved.

But because they believed in their dreams and took action, they accomplished a host of scientific breakthroughs.

Follow your dreams.

If you have a dream, it’s been given to you for a reason. You can decide whether to follow it, or whether to ignore it. Following it might be hard—it might take time (so much time) and lots of unacknowledged, thankless effort, so it makes sense that the easier path of “ignoring it” is often chosen. Following a dream is always, always hard because we are forced to move outside our comfort zones. At the end of the day, however, do you want to be the person who followed their dream, or the one who let it go?

I know that I want to be the one who tried for that dream, even if it isn’t obvious that I will attain it. It’s my hope that you will find and follow your dreams, too. It’s why I’ve created Dream It, Do It, and why I invite you to join me.