Katalin Karikó and the bottomless scam
OR: never read your heroes' autobiographies (MYSTERY POST #16)
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The feel-good story of 2022 went like this: We finally prevailed over a global pandemic, and it was all thanks to a little-known scientist named Katalin Karikó.
She had toiled in obscurity for decades—she never got a tenure-track job, and the University of Pennsylvania at one point demoted her, infamously describing her as “not of facu…