NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A powerful memoir from Katalin Karikó winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine whose decades-long research led to the COVID-19 vaccines “Katalin
Karikó’s story is an inspiration.”—Bill Gates “Riveting . . . a true story of a brilliant
biochemist who never gave up or gave in.”—Bonnie Garmus author of Lessons in Chemistry A
KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Katalin Karikó has had an unlikely journey. The daughter
of a butcher in postwar communist Hungary Karikó grew up in an adobe home that lacked running
water and her family grew their own vegetables. She saw the wonders of nature all around her
and was determined to become a scientist. That determination eventually brought her to the
United States where she arrived as a postdoctoral fellow in 1985 with $1 200 sewn into her
toddler’s teddy bear and a dream to remake medicine. Karikó worked in obscurity battled
cockroaches in a windowless lab and faced outright derision and even deportation threats from
her bosses and colleagues. She balked as prestigious research institutions increasingly
conflated science and money. Despite setbacks she never wavered in her belief that an
ephemeral and underappreciated molecule called messenger RNA could change the world. Karikó
believed that someday mRNA would transform ordinary cells into tiny factories capable of
producing their own medicines on demand. She sacrificed nearly everything for this dream but
the obstacles she faced only motivated her and eventually she succeeded. Karikó’s
three-decade-long investigation into mRNA would lead to a staggering achievement: vaccines that
protected millions of people from the most dire consequences of COVID-19. These vaccines are
just the beginning of mRNA’s potential. Today the medical community eagerly awaits more mRNA
vaccines—for the flu HIV and other emerging infectious diseases. Breaking Through isn’t
just the story of an extraordinary woman. It’s an indictment of closed-minded thinking and a
testament to one woman’s commitment to laboring intensely in obscurity—knowing she might never
be recognized in a culture that is driven by prestige power and privilege—because she
believed her work would save lives.
