A thought on failure, science and resisting instant gratification

“It is very well known that you learn more from failure—when things are not working well… It is very important not to focus on success—it’s so rare. If you want instant gratification, don’t be a scientist, because you won’t get that. You try many things and you don’t know whether something is doable or not. But this is being a scientist. We are doing things that nobody has done before, and we don’t know whether it is possible.”
— Katalin Karikó

A Nobel laureate, Katalin Karikó has certainly known both failure and stunning success. I read her memoir, Breaking Through: My Life in Science, earlier this year, and found her story absorbing, even though I knew the broad strokes from media coverage over the last five years.

Born in rural Hungary, Karikó eventually came to the United States, but ran into indifference and worse as she persisted in exploring mRNA.

Admittedly stubborn, she stuck with her conviction that she was onto something, even if its application to vaccines was not on her horizon as she pursued her (largely unfunded) research. She was actually demoted at the University of Pennsylvania, the institution that gave itself a victory lap when the first COVID-19 vaccines were introduced. Karikó’s story was eventually told, bolstered by a Gina Kolata profile in the New York Times in April 2021, and then by an episode of the podcast The Daily some weeks later.

Her book eventually followed. I highly recommend it.

Today’s quote comes from an interview she gave in 2024 to the journal Issues in Science and Technology. Find more quotes posted to Dot Dot Dot here.