Katalin Karikó is the first Hungarian woman to win the Nobel Prize. She was awarded jointly with her colleague Drew Weissman with the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for laying the foundations for mRNA-based medicine, which has also enabled the rapid development and practical application of new types of vaccines against COVID-19.
Katalin Karikó began her scientific career at the Biological Research Centre of Szeged in the 1980s and quickly became involved in the study of messenger RNA (mRNA). She is now an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania with Drew Weissman with whom they have received numerous other awards, including the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, Time Magazine's Hero of the Year 2021, and the Tang Prize Award in Biopharmaceutical Science in 2022.
A day later, on 3 October Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Krausz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 jointly with Pierre Agostini and Anne L’Huillier “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.
Professor Krausz studied theoretical physics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and electrical engineering at the Budapest University of Technology (BME) in Hungary. In 2005, at the suggestion of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the BME. He is the director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching and a professor of experimental physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In addition to numerous awards, he has already received the Wittgenstein Prize and the Leibniz Prize.
The list of Hungarian and Hungarian-born Nobel laureates:
Fülöp Lénárd (Chemistry, 1905)
Robert Bárány (Medicine, 1914)
Richard A. Zsigmondy (Chemistry, 1925)
Albert Szent-Györgyi (Medicine, 1937)
György Hevesy (Chemistry, 1943)
György Békésy (Medicine, 1961)
Jenő Wigner (Physics, 1963)
Dénes Gábor (Physics, 1971)
John C. Polanyi (Chemistry, 1986)
János Harsányi (Economics, 1994)
György Oláh (Chemistry, 1994)
Imre Kertész (Literature, 2002)
Ferenc Herskó (Chemistry, 2004)
Katalin Karikó (Medicine, 2023)
Ferenc Krausz (Physics, 2023)
Sources: