The scientist whose research was key to developing the COVID vaccines was demoted, had her salary cut, and threatened with deportation. Today, she won the Nobel Prize

(Credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP)

The Nobel laureate whose work contributed to the lighting-fast development of COVID-19 vaccines in 2020 achieved her goal despite being discouraged and ultimately “kicked out” of the Ivy League university where she worked, she told the Nobel Organization.

Katalin Karikó, now a vicepresident at BioNTech, and her colleague Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania, received this year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for work on messenger RNA, or mRNA. Announced Monday, the Nobel Foundation said their work was “critical” to the rapid development of the first vaccines against the coronavirus in 2020.