Nobel Prize winner Katalin Karikó speaks at the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine on Sept. 2, 2023.
Credit: Abhiram Juvvadi2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine laureate and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine Katalin Karikó was featured in Pfizer’s Super Bowl commercial on Sunday.
The commercial promoted the biopharmaceutical company's 175-year history, contextualizing its efforts to “outdo” cancer as the “next fight” among science’s greatest breakthroughs. Karikó was featured alongside female medical trailblazers Marie Maynard Daly and Rosalind Franklin, as well as other renowned scientists like Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein.
During the 60-second advertisement, named “Here’s to Science,” Karikó was shown in a newspaper clipping that described how her pioneering work on mRNA technology exemplifies the role of women in advancing medical science.
The photo of Karikó comes to life to sing words of Queen's “Don't Stop Me Now,” singing the last words of the line, “I wanna make a supersonic woman of you.”
Karikó shared her appearance in the commercial alongside other famous scientists in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, writing, “It can't be better than that.”
Karikó told the Philadelphia Business Journal that she knew about Pfizer’s Super Bowl commercial in advance and watched it with her family members on the phone.
Her work alongside Penn Medicine researcher Drew Weissman on mRNA vaccine technology — for which they won the Nobel Prize — served as the foundation for the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines in 2020. Their groundbreaking 2005 study found that mRNA can be modified in the laboratory to reduce RNA's inflammatory potential and produce higher amounts of antigenic protein.
Over 500 million doses of these two vaccines have been administered in the United States alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Karikó and Weissman have since won a multitude of awards for their research. Among others, they won the Dean’s Distinguished Award — which was awarded by then-Penn Medicine Dean Larry Jameson — along with the 2021 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the 2022 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
The duo have also been named TIME Magazine’s Heroes of the Year, and were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
The Daily Pennsylvanian is an independent, student-run newspaper. Please consider making a donation to support the coverage that shapes the University. Your generosity ensures a future of strong journalism at Penn.
Donate