Kataliné Karikó is this year's Bólyai award

Research biologist Katalin Karikó was awarded the 2021 Bolyai Prize. The recognition was presented by the President of the Republic János Áder at the festive gala organized on Friday evening in the Gala Hall of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA).

"The path of science is bumpy, the path of mRNA technology was also bumpy, which the whole world is celebrating today," said János Áder. Katalin Karikó also learned what the low point means in the life of a researcher and that what has no immediate benefit can later become indispensable knowledge, she emphasized. He added: the researcher also learned that those who obsessively stick to their truth and are driven by the need to prove it, sooner or later may be right.

"mRNA technology is now not only the pet peeve of a Hungarian researcher, but also a wide-ranging possibility in treatment and prevention. We Hungarians are proud of our compatriot, who started from Hungary and reached the international forefront of his profession," said János Áder.

Praising this year's prize winner, János Áder said: Katalin Karikó thought of something before those who only go after already recognized problems. He was driven by the passionate curiosity characteristic of the greatest. This is why the development of the vaccine against the coronavirus could be so fast. As she put it, Katalin Karikó recognized the still unknown, set out on the untraveled path.

 "Our age is based on science and requires the expression of a scientist, knowledge of his motives, ideas, and opinions. We must therefore reveal ourselves so that science is not seen as a distant landscape, but as a human formula that can be observed up close," the President of the Republic quoted the words of the world-famous Hungarian stress researcher János Selye.

As he put it, it is part of the "human formula" that Katalin Karikó is no longer just one of the many excellent Hungarian scientists, but a real world star who is curious, whose opinion matters and who is willing to be a scientist based on science, but who is often distrustful of science. in our time, testify to the truth with your personal credit.

As he emphasized, the Bolyai Award is the most prestigious scientific award in Hungary. The recognition of the homeland, the homeland, the Hungarians for the great achievements of our fellow scientists.

Gábor Szabó, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Bolyai Prize Foundation, said: successful research is hardly born without patience and perseverance, and Katalin Karikó faced quite a few challenges, at least 24 of her applications were rejected, but she saw these as something to learn from.

Not only is she a well-deserved world-renowned person and researcher, but also a personality who we could hardly set a better role model for the researchers of the future - emphasized Gábor Szabó, praising Katalin Karikó, whose patent was used to create the world's first clinically proven third-generation Pfizer/BioNTech in 2020 Covid-19 (Comirnaty) vaccine.

After receiving the award, Katalin Karikó called it a great honor that the members of the board of trustees considered her worthy of the country's most prestigious scientific award.

The Hungarian research biologist and biochemist who won the Széchenyi Prize expressed his joy at receiving the award at the MTA headquarters, because, as he recalled, his career began with the support of the MTA scholarship in 1978, when he began his research on mRNA at the MTA research center in Szeged. The laureate recalled the winding road he had taken since 1978 and which brought him back to where he started.

At the end of his speech, he expressed his gratitude to his parents, who always taught him what is beautiful and good, his sister, his teachers, mentors, and fellow students. She especially thanked her husband, who always considered it important that her dreams come true. As he said, he hopes that more and more young people will choose the cultivation of science as a life goal and that more and more will become researchers, because there is still so much to discover in the world.

The first Bolyai Prize was awarded in 2000 to the current president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, neurobiologist Tamás Freund, followed by computer scientist Tamás Roska, physicist Zsolt Bor, mathematician László Lovász, archaeologist Zsigmond Ritoók, classical philologist, chemist András Perczel, and neurobiologist Zoltán Nusser. , biologist Csaba Pál, and É. Linguist Katalin Kiss. The most recent awardee was network researcher László Barabási-Albert in 2019.

Source: Felvidek.ma/MTI

Photo: MTI/Zoltán Máthé