Spies everywhere

 Katalin Karikó is a Hungarian-born biochemist who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Drew Weissman. They were recognized for discoveries about nucleoside base modifications in mRNA, which made effective mRNA vaccines possible, including the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

She was born in 1955 in Szolnok and grew up in Kisújszállás. She studied at the University of Szeged and moved to the United States in 1985. For years, she struggled to get funding at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked with Weissman.

The new Hungarian government is opening the Security Services' top-secret files, and her file shows she had been working for them all along. I remember that during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the AVO's secret files were also opened. My father went to see his own file (we lived in Budapest's center; the AVO HQ, the central security organization, was nearby). Somebody had informed on him that he was "clerical," that is, a religious person, which I assume meant a very black mark in the Communist regime.