The phone rang at 3:40 in the morning. Katalin Karikó’s husband answered, then passed it to her. “It’s for you.” A voice from Stockholm said she had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. She assumed it was a prank. The world already knew her work through the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. But almost nobody knew her.

Ten years before that call, Penn refused to give back the faculty post it had taken from her, so she joined a young company in Germany called BioNTech and worked there for the next decade.

Eighteen years before the call, Nature and Science rejected the paper that would later help win her the prize.

Twenty-eight years before, Penn demoted her after her grant applications kept getting rejected. But she stayed and kept working on mRNA anyway.

Thirty-eight years before, she left Hungary with her husband, their two-year-old daughter, and the money from selling their car stuffed inside the girl’s teddy bear.