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Katalin Karikó shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine this week for her work on mRNA vaccines that were instrumental in fighting COVID-19.
In 1995, her research was not showing results, and UPenn gave her the choice to quit or be demoted (she chose demotion).
In 2005, she wrote her breakthrough paper on RNA. But not many noticed at the time.
In 2013:
Karikó has been at the helm of BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine development. In 2013, she accepted an offer to become Senior Vice President at BioNTech after UPenn refused to reinstate her to the faculty position she had been demoted from in 1995. “They told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality,” she said. ”When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.’ -- Wired
It's reasonable to look at her story and think about timing and luck. But it's also a great reminder to keep going. The world is changing so fast that there are countless opportunities for us to be early or late on. And for many of those, we are both. So, we might as well keep going.
Keep Going
I just told my daughter yesterday,
that faith is a valuable thing we can rescue from Christian religion:
- We should always have faith in equality, forgiveness, goodness and kind love (this keeps us humane)
- We should always have faith in humanity's capability to go far (this keeps us progressing)
Faith is useful because proof is costly and sometimes proof is not available, it's also part of our evolutionary algorithm to not get stuck in local maximums.
We can't know for sure the results of going where nobody has gone before
Definitely a lesson in persistence.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Jensen Huang famously pivots away from ideas and tries new ones out.
We need a Serenity Prayer for business, where we emphasize that knowing the difference between these two situations is the whole ballgame.