An Anonymous Savior | Career Angles
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Despite my best efforts, I work in relative anonymity. I created and host the number one podcast in my category in iTunes with more than 2100 episodes over more than ten years. I’ve written eight books and have almost 7000 videos on YouTube. My name is not one that the world knows.
I resonate with people who work anonymously and try to convey ideas. Most of the time, their ideas are ignored, and often so are they.
Then there are the magic moments where a person’s time has come, where the work of your life meets a moment of need.
I listened to a podcast called “The Daily,” which told the story of a woman who learned about mRNA in Hungary while in graduate school in the 1970s. Dr. Katalin “Katie” Kariko began work to create mRNA in a lab when the technology was not very good. She believed that since this was the transport system for instructions between DNA and the rest of the cells, it will be possible to change its programming to change the message. You could tell a cell to do anything you wanted.
In the 1970s, while working on her Ph.D., she worked in a lab studying it, but the tech didn’t exist to make it. And the research center she worked for ran out of money, and she lost her job.
In 1985, Dr. Kariko’s story continued with a move to the United States, where currency restrictions in Hungary prohibited her and her family from taking money out of the country. They smuggled some from the sale of the family car into her two years old daughter’s teddy bear.
Her first job in the US was at a doctoral position paying $17000 and eventually was hired for a low-level position at U Penn, where she hoped to pursue her research in mRNA.
By now, the technology has evolved, and you could make mRNA. She had the idea of making some and putting it into a cell to see if you could give it instructions to do something it would not have done before.
She began work with another scientist on her hypothesis. Data came out of the test equipment confirming that they made a cell that would do something it would never have done before. She understood that this success had huge potential.
