Paula was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). She received her doctoral degree in 1964 from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In 1965, she began a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, where her work focused on the biophysical properties of nucleic acids. During that time, Paula also frequented Paris on a European Molecular Biology Organization fellowship at the Institut Curie working on the physico-chemical properties of polynucleotides. It was in Paris where Paula's interest in interferon took hold. Following the discovery of interferon, the ability of double-stranded RNA to elicit type I interferons was appreciated. Given her expertise in polynucleotides, Paula was intrigued by the finding that simple double-stranded polynucleotides such as poly(l:C) could induce interferon in cell culture. After some time at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, Paula moved to the Johns Hopkins Cancer Center.
Initially, she was eager to find more effective interferon-inducing polynucleotides. She established her own laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in 1971. A major breakthrough at the time involved her laboratory's development of a mechanism to detect the interferon-encoding RNA itself. The ability to detect mRNA encoding a biologically active protein allowed the cloning of not only interferon but also other cytokine-encoding genes.
