15 000 Forint The Hungarian discovery forming the basis for mRNA vaccines

Katalin Karikó spent decades at the University of Pennsylvania having her mRNA research defunded, demoted, and largely ignored by the American academic establishment. The Hungarian National Bank issued this coin the year before she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Drew Weissman — the 2023 award validating work that had been dismissed as a scientific dead end for most of the 1990s and 2000s. The critical breakthrough was modifying nucleosides in synthetic mRNA to prevent the immune system from destroying it before it could function.