Nobel winner whose work led to COVID-19 vaccines inspired her daughter to Olympic victory

Olympic gold medallist Susan Francia is coming to terms with the fact that she’s no longer the most famous person in her family.

That’s because the retired U.S. rower’s mother, Katalin Karikó, just won a Nobel Prize in Medicine. The biochemist was awarded alongside her colleague, vaccine researcher Drew Weissman, for their groundbreaking work that led to the development of COVID-19 vaccines. 

“Now I’m like, ‘Shoot! All right, I’ve got to work harder,'” Francia said with a laugh during an interview with As It Happens host Nil Köksal. 

But in all seriousness, Francia says she’s immensely proud of her mother’s accomplishments. In fact, it was Karikó’s fierce dedication to science that inspired Francia to win Olympic gold medals in 2009 and 2012.

“Sport is a lot like science in that, you know, you have a passion for something and you just go and you train, attain your goal, whether it be making this discovery that you truly believe in, or for me, it was trying to be the best in the world,” Francia said.

“It’s a grind and, honestly, I love that grind. And my mother did too.”

Karikó says she’s as proud of her daughter as her daughter is of her.

“She was persistent and worked hard and she was not giving up,” she said of Francia’s rowing career. “Even when her [hand], you know, was full of blisters.”

‘Rowing Mom Wins Nobel’

Karikó was senior vice-president and head of RNA protein replacement at BioNTech until 2022, and has since acted as adviser to the company. She is also a professor at the University of Szeged in Hungary and adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

She’s been getting a lot of media attention since she won medicine’s most prestigious prize.

But one of her favourite headlines so far comes from a little blurb on the rowing website Row 2K: “Rowing Mom Wins Nobel.”

“I love that title. That’s showing that we have another role. As a scientist, we are moms, and we are rooting for our children,” she said.

“And beside that, of course, we can win a Nobel Prize.”

Karikó and Weissman won that prize for their pioneering research into the practical uses of messenger RNA, or mRNA, a natural molecule that instructs the body to produce proteins. 

That research formed the basis of today’s most effective COVID-19 vaccines.

“There was a lot of criticism about how, oh, it was … approved overnight,” Francia said. “In my mind, I always thought, ‘No, this is my mom’s life work.'”

Nowadays, scientists are trying to harness the power of mRNA to fight cancer, malaria, influenza and rabies. But when Karikó first began her work, it was a fringe concept. For decades, she toiled in relative obscurity, struggling to secure funding for her research.

“That’s also that same passion that I took into my rowing,” Francia said.

But even as Karikó struggled to make a name for herself, she says her own mother, Zsuzsanna, always believed she would earn a Nobel Prize one day.

Every year, as the Nobel Prize announcement approached, she would tell Karikó she’d be watching for her name. 

“I was laughing [and saying] that, ‘Mom, I am not getting anything,'” she said. 

But her mother, who died a few years ago, ultimately proved correct. 

“Maybe she is up there somewhere listening and smiling, ‘I said so!'” Karikó said with a chuckle. 

Karikó says she has often thought of her parents since the pandemic thrust her and her work into the spotlight. 

When the family first immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary, she says they had very little. But they taught her and her sister that every problem has a solution; you just have to work hard to find it.

“All of the children are watching their parents, you know, what they say, how they act, and they … try to follow that,” she said. 

It’s a lesson she’s tried to emulate for her own daughter — and it seems to have worked.

Francia says she hit up against many obstacles in her pursuit of Olympic gold — injuries, losses and people who told her she should just give up.

“Instead, I was like, ‘No, I know I can be the best.’ I know I deserve to be in that boat and I know I’m going to get that gold medal. I’m going to do everything I can to go get it.”