1. Meet Katalin Karico

It is an inspiring story. And a most relevant one for now and going forward. It's my honor to introduce you to Katalin Karico, if you have never heard of her. I hadn't until yesterday.

There is no doubt in my mind she will win a Nobel Prize some day.

2. The pioneering Dr. Katalin Kariko — who fled Communist-run Hungary at 30 for the US in 1985 with $1,200 hidden inside her 2-year-old daughter’s teddy bear — isn’t as powerful or rich as Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel or BioNTech’s Ugur Sahin. Nor has she ever been celebrated.

3. Kariko’s obsessive 40 years of research into synthetic messenger RNA was long thought to be a boring dead-end. She said she was chronically overlooked, scorned, fired, demoted, repeatedly refused government and corporate grants, and threatened with deportation.

4. All along, though, Kariko held fast to her belief in mRNA, which has turned out to be key to building the complicated technology behind the new vaccines developed by Moderna and Germany’s BioNTech (which has teamed with Pfizer.)

5. The co-inventor of modified mRNA, Katalin Karikó is finally getting her moment. She remembers sitting in her father’s butcher shop as a little girl, unafraid of the blood and entrails.