Katalin Karikó and the bottomless scam

OR: never read your heroes' autobiographies

photo cred: my dad

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…