My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" research along avenues of inquiry that other folks find worth pursuing. Often times this means building on existing lines of research over pursuing new paths.
The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers, collaborate to push existing lines of inquiry, write lots of hopefully approved grants, and grow a lab into what is effectively a "successful small business". Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.
The incentives for everyone involved is just a complete and total mess. I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Had she been, then she would have found herself hired immediately somewhere because universities are incentivized to play a numbers game and get as many folks in writing grants as possible.
Physics Nobel winner Peter Higgs (of the boson) said the same ten years ago: “Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough.”
1) Ken Iverson who invented the APL programming language and went on to win the Turing Award in 1979, had already published 'that one little book' that was considered insufficient for tenure, but which formed the basis for the award.
2) tubes remained the main focus of MIT faculty for quite some years after the transistor was invented. It was Robert Noyce and the people he worked with at Grinnell College who knew more about transistors than MIT : https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyc...
Reading the comments here, it seems that even very prestigious universities are full of academic pettiness and dysfunction which deny all of us the output of brilliant people like Katalin Karikó.
It leaves me wondering: why do we not create any new universities? Why doesn't a Carnegie of our age create a new university? Brin University? Zuck University? This seems like a no brainer.
I think it might seem difficult to attract new talent to an "unestablished" university. But what if you make a simple promise: we will never, ever get in your way, the way that universities do today. We will never pressure you to publish subpar results. We will never nit-pick your purchase of a laptop. Have vision! Pursue things that are promising to you! We trust you, smart person, and we will give you autonomy to do what you think is promising. Based on what is discussed here, it seems like that would be extraordinarily compelling to the most optimistic, least cynical, and probably at least a handful of the most brilliant researchers out there. If the winning move is not to play the game, don't play.
I don't know. It just seems like there is a narrow-mindedness at play. A sense that "why try to fix this -- we'll never beat UPenn. Maybe not, but isn't it worth a try, based on how dysfunctional academia is? All it takes is the will.
Look into the difficulties faced by the University of Austin [1] (not the University of Texas at Austin).
This is a project which explicitly seems to be pushing back against the current toxic academic environment, yet a major issue they are encountering seems to be degree accreditation. To get "recognized" these days, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) [2] will need to agree that your school teaches things correctly. Of course, the AAUP is responsible for the current toxic academic environment, so it's a catch-22.
Zuck University almost certainly will be fully aligned with the AAUP.
Unless the organization is fundamentally structured with difference incentives, I'm not sure it'll achieve a different outcome.
It's a hard but necessary challenge to prioritize research, which requires that every research group advocate the utility of their work and be evaluated in comparison with others.
They often fund new departments or centers within existing universities, because despite all the complaining about overhead rates, setting up an organization required to house, support, accept funding for, etc. research is non-trivial.
My current position is in a department like that - it's funded heavily from several $Person'sName Foundation
Azim Premji University? Wealthy people are definitely setting up universities except they are outside the US. The center of gravity of academia is shifting eastward imho.
Lagging indicators like patents per capita and Nobel prizes will also follow in a generation or so.
Her book Breaking Through [1] also goes into more detail about this. Basically academia is now ruled by the same rotten economic lenses as the rest of the economy. Everything is about profits, labs are evaluated in "grant $/sqft." and people are evaluated on a "resume" or dumb metrics like papers published. It's really hopeless how this economic virus infects every little corner of our world and turns it to shit.
This isn't just one story, there are countless other researchers and even life-saving drugs that are not developed purely because of this mindset. For a brief moment in time during the COVID pandemic we saw that it is possible to have a better system but it's been forgotten just as quickly.
At least profits have some rough relationship with reality in most industries. In academia it is the worst of both worlds. You need to be a start up hype man type (or something adjacent anyway) to get the grants, but you only need to deliver a paper at the end - not an actually functional product or organization. So we do not see the same upside that a market driven approach might have for eventually finding a stable state, only the downside of being ruthlessly metric driven.
Some of this is universal, but much of her story is particular to how US med schools operate: their research faculty tend to be largely soft money in nature, so grant money is even more necessary than in other 'hard money' jobs in non-med school fields. Such a system is destined to fail when geniuses like Kariko pursue risky new territory for which large grants are hard to secure.
The really distasteful thing here is Penn as an institution. They have reaped the benefits of her work in terms of mRNA patent royalties (a very large number I believe), and of course reputationally. Yet, they treated her truly terribly and have never - and it seems like will never - acknowledge it. For example, Sean Grady, mentioned here as the one that essentially cleared out her lab in 2013 without telling her is the chair of neurosurgery at Penn Medicine. Will he apologize? I doubt it.
It's not just academia. A friend of mine was involved in the development of a ground breaking medicine for a pretty common incurable disease. The results of the first and second round trials were fantastic, giving a significant number of patients a normal quality of life that they hadn't experienced in years.
The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that harmful side effects were discovered, but due to a bad testing methodology, the results were not nearly as good as they were. The big pharma company recognized the issue, but a revised third round trial would delay the introduction by years, at which time the amount of profits to make from the medicine were considered too low due to patent expiration. So they just dropped it altogether.
It would be too uneconomical for a new company to kickstart the whole approval process again: as soon as the patents expire, other companies would immediately release their generic variant.
End result: millions of potential carriers of the disease won't see the benefit of a medicine that has been shown to work.
I suspect myriad. Academic politics is messier than real-world politics. In the Dark Triad personality classification, Machiavellianism should be a job requirement for professors if they are to succeed in such a twisted climate (and, as it turns out, many meet that requirement). Bear in mind that academics are better at generalized problem solving than most people, so their attempts to find viable solutions to complex political problems tend to be either elaborate or manipulative.
Good people do exist in academia, but most of them have retired, and the rest put up with it. I have a general belief that, unlike the majority of careers, being a successful academic (and I can't underscore "academic" enough) requires a strong moral compass, historically oriented toward a "Divine Light of Truth" or God, which ever floats your boat. Such is not required in a grant-seeking paradigm.
Sadly it's not just academia either. I've seen brilliant innovative engineers get buried because they don't spend the requisite 75% of their time managing the bureaucracy of large orgs.
I'd go out on a limb to say "likely many", especially since this is a rather new phenomenon. This is yet another example of bean-counters being at the helm: in their pursuit for productivity (narrowly defined as "impact factor"), they have undermined the very conditions that favor meaningful discovery. These essentially boil down to: the ability for research faculty to make long-term, risky bets.
What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.
But how would you solve this issue though? Once you decide that you will value and promote people who fit the characteristics of Kariko, a thousand impostors immediately pop up who will match all the outward appearances of that you wanted to promote.
I've been in rooms with Academics with egos so big it displaces enough oxygen to make it stifling. No one will challenge their behavior because it may affect their career. IMHO it is the due to the culture of Academia which is often win lose and credit based. This eventually leads to unethical behavior in some cases - falsification of data, theft of ideas and believe it or not sabotage. Any type or advancement is almost strictly based on what you can take credit for doing.
There is no Nobel for people that run labs that produce the next 10 Nobel winners other than themselves.
Academia makes what it measures (papers that get cited). You do not need brilliant minds to do this kind of work: you just need hard-working, highly motivated "midwits" and you can pay them accordingly.
A complementary story to the one about Karikó is one about a researcher in Texas who, prior to the pandemic, kept getting his grant proposals for a coronavirus vaccine denied because "no one cares about coronaviruses".
I'd link to articles about it but right now searching for anything having to do with Texas, coronavirus, and vaccine, is buried in articles about Texas vaccine politics.
But you're right — Karikó's story is textbook, prototypical, and its strength is its greatest weakness, that it's almost abnormally illuminated. We never know about all the other stories out there that aren't lucky enough to be exposed so clearly.
IMO there is nothing to wonder as it is part of everything in life. Brilliant candidates not getting job, brilliant students not getting thru school/college admissions, brilliant players not getting into school/college/professional teams of choice and so on.
Having always a suitable opportunity for someone's skillset is impossible.
> This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.
I don't think this problem is exclusive of academia. Anyone in the job market has war stories about ridiculous hiring processes that reject candidates for the most pathetic reasons.
Being currently in the middle of belatedly reading The Black Swan, I can't help but see this as a classic case. Penn has a formula that's supposed to predict "success," and it's a linear formula: more papers & funding leads linearly to more success. y = mx + b which is totally how the world works, right? Not if you've read Nassim Taleb or even Paul Graham's essays about mining unfashionable/disreputable/heretical ground for ideas nobody else has thought of or is willing to consider. Just like startups, somebody is going to discover something huge in there. Even if you were willing to say a university isn't a place of ideas for their own sake, and is instead nothing more than a venture capital firm like their bureaucrats seem to be asserting - in short even with the profit/greed motive intact, it still seems like a dumb strategy to model the world as linear and boring.
Academia does not value quality, but quantity. It selects for scientists who are the best at marketing and networking, not necessarily doing quality science, though they can also be.
I have no idea how to fix this, but competition needs to be reduced, probably by more guaranteed funding for positions, not just projects, as grants are. This latest military aid package is 2x the entire NIH budget, so surely there is more money for science out there.
The root problem is that (particularly in R1's) the job of raising money to perform the science has devolved somewhat to the level of individual labs and PI's, which creates an incentive that rewards good fundraisers in a much more predictable way than good researchers. In theory this could be addressed by more rigor in the funding agencies review processes, but they aren't resourced to really handle that.
It's like a baby (both in size and impact) version of the problem in US Congress & Senate.
Part of it is that research grants are not used fully as a research funding source - a typical university administration will skim about a quarter of every grant for "administrative costs." It's not called out as corruption because it's the norm, but it does have the effect of reducing the amount of tax-funded R&D dollars that actually make it to R&D
As a result, the people in charge of hiring and firing have a self-preserving interest to value grant-earners
It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive.
It would also help lower some of the pressure to publish or perish, since a lot of that comes from the need to chase grants.
While I see where you're coming from, I'm very conflicted on your approach to address this. I don't think throwing more money at the problem fixes the underlying issues, if anything, I would expect them to deepen. There was an article making the rounds some time ago on HN how something like three quarters of medical studies had either strong data analysis errors in them or had complete bogus data, to the point where it was impossible to tell whether the results had any grain of truth to them. That's an absurd ratio, and not something I would want to fund.
My dad was a professor and would joke that the way a tenure committee made their decision was that they'd print out all your papers, put them in a folder, and then throw it down a stairwell. If your packet made it to the bottom, it would be an easy yes. If it made it halfway down it would be marginal. If it only made it down a few steps it would be a definite no.
There's also the old aphorism that tenure committees can't read, but they can count.
I think the opposite, we need more raw labor aimed at replicating scientific results. Today our institutions are so tiny they can hardly afford what few projects are funded to completion.
In many professions including the business of startups and academia you need to be at least as good at selling something as you are at developing/discovering it.
Yes, academia (at least STEM) is such that you need to be good at selling something. The difference is that the goal of a startup is to make money, whereas that's not the goal of research.
We could apply the mentality everywhere. Do you want to tell teachers they need to be as good at selling their skills as they are at teaching?
Researchers are there to research. If a theoretical physicist publishes a lot of papers in high quality journals without bringing in money (because they don't need the money to do the research), they'll be denied tenure. Even when doing experimental work: If I bring enough to buy my equipment, and pay for the staff (e.g. students) and publish good papers, I'll be denied tenure if my colleague who is doing very different research is bringing in a lot more money, because he has decided to target that metric.
Researchers need money to do their research. They shouldn't be asked to bring in a lot more than they need.
While that may be true today, in the research sciences — there should be some kind of middle ground.
Thomas Edison may have been a giant of self promotion. But I would argue Nikola Tesla invented as much or more foundationally important technology we use today. I would argue Tesla like Kariko will never be a wiz at self promotion. But a domain expert should have spotted them early on. I mean isn’t that the job of people who dole out tax payer money for research?
UPDATE. I mixed up Edison and Tesla. Tesla was the champion self promoter.
Just a reminder Einstien who was the most revolutionary scientist since Newton was unable to secure a teaching position prior to publishing 3 nobel prize worthy papers in 1 year. Why do we think academia has suddenly magically changed?
To be fair, he wrote those papers after not getting a job as a professor. He graduated in 1900, applied for teaching positions for two years after that, and then had his annus mirabilis in 1905, that's when he wrote the papers you're referring to. After that, he then applied again, and had a teaching position in 1908, then a full professorship in 1911. So, it's not that people looked at three Nobel-prize caliber discoveries, and said "you're not faculty quality, Mr. Einstein"
> “I do hope that it causes Penn and a bunch of other institutions that fund science this way to reflect a little bit on what the chances are that some scientists who do not get funding, and wind up leaving, end up being like Katalin Karikó,” Scales said.
A brilliant woman scientist researching an uncool topic hits the trifecta of resistance to her work. It's wonderful to see her persistence vindicated but it sounds like time for a revolution in how university research is managed. The closing quote of the article is very disappointing.
> ...but it sounds like time for a revolution in how university research is managed.
Agreed...but it was probably time for a revolution 50 years ago. Suffice to say that those actively causing the problems are very widely, deeply, and skillfully entrenched. And willing to fight to the (metaphorical) death in defense of the current system.
Vs...could you tell me how numerous, skilled, and well-armed your hoped-for revolutionary army might be?
A revolution will likely make things even worse. Once you decide on selecting a certain trait, a thousand imposters will pop up immediately, who superficially match all the criteria that you wanted to select for.
> Unless something changes, this isn’t going to go well," Grady told Karikó, according to her memoir.
While unpleasant, this is a conversation that is sometimes necessary to have as someone in a position of power communicating to a subordinate.
> In 2013, Karikó said she returned to her lab after spending time away to find all of her belongings having been packed, moved, and misplaced at Grady's direction.
Tangentially related, but her daughter is Susan Francia, who is an Olympic gold medalist rower. It's wild to me when you see family members at the top of their completely different fields.
> In 2013—after enduring multiple professional setbacks, one denied grant after another, and a demotion at the institution to which she’d been devoted for decades—Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., walked out of her lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine for the last time.
> That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”
As someone who is not in academia, I'm curious how dysfunctional the incentive structures of these institutions really are? Is it more the case that aggrieved professors doing actually good research is just a rare situation bound to happen every once in a while?
Everyone picks on Penn, but really the whole academic community made this mistake. Her research was public; any other university could have offered her a job as well. Nobody realized how important her research was at the time.
Penn sold the patent to an outside company? Maybe it should be standard in such cases (if it isn't already) to give the researchers the right of first refusal.
[+] [-] thelittlenag|2 years ago|reply
The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers, collaborate to push existing lines of inquiry, write lots of hopefully approved grants, and grow a lab into what is effectively a "successful small business". Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.
The incentives for everyone involved is just a complete and total mess. I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Had she been, then she would have found herself hired immediately somewhere because universities are incentivized to play a numbers game and get as many folks in writing grants as possible.
[+] [-] kps|2 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
[+] [-] shrubble|2 years ago|reply
1) Ken Iverson who invented the APL programming language and went on to win the Turing Award in 1979, had already published 'that one little book' that was considered insufficient for tenure, but which formed the basis for the award.
2) tubes remained the main focus of MIT faculty for quite some years after the transistor was invented. It was Robert Noyce and the people he worked with at Grinnell College who knew more about transistors than MIT : https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyc...
[+] [-] mlsu|2 years ago|reply
It leaves me wondering: why do we not create any new universities? Why doesn't a Carnegie of our age create a new university? Brin University? Zuck University? This seems like a no brainer.
I think it might seem difficult to attract new talent to an "unestablished" university. But what if you make a simple promise: we will never, ever get in your way, the way that universities do today. We will never pressure you to publish subpar results. We will never nit-pick your purchase of a laptop. Have vision! Pursue things that are promising to you! We trust you, smart person, and we will give you autonomy to do what you think is promising. Based on what is discussed here, it seems like that would be extraordinarily compelling to the most optimistic, least cynical, and probably at least a handful of the most brilliant researchers out there. If the winning move is not to play the game, don't play.
I don't know. It just seems like there is a narrow-mindedness at play. A sense that "why try to fix this -- we'll never beat UPenn. Maybe not, but isn't it worth a try, based on how dysfunctional academia is? All it takes is the will.
[+] [-] waterheater|2 years ago|reply
This is a project which explicitly seems to be pushing back against the current toxic academic environment, yet a major issue they are encountering seems to be degree accreditation. To get "recognized" these days, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) [2] will need to agree that your school teaches things correctly. Of course, the AAUP is responsible for the current toxic academic environment, so it's a catch-22.
Zuck University almost certainly will be fully aligned with the AAUP.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin
[2] https://www.aaup.org/
[+] [-] etrautmann|2 years ago|reply
It's a hard but necessary challenge to prioritize research, which requires that every research group advocate the utility of their work and be evaluated in comparison with others.
[+] [-] Fomite|2 years ago|reply
My current position is in a department like that - it's funded heavily from several $Person'sName Foundation
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lupire|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sai_|2 years ago|reply
Lagging indicators like patents per capita and Nobel prizes will also follow in a generation or so.
[+] [-] zaptheimpaler|2 years ago|reply
This isn't just one story, there are countless other researchers and even life-saving drugs that are not developed purely because of this mindset. For a brief moment in time during the COVID pandemic we saw that it is possible to have a better system but it's been forgotten just as quickly.
[1] https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/breaking-through-34
[+] [-] caddemon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contemporary343|2 years ago|reply
The really distasteful thing here is Penn as an institution. They have reaped the benefits of her work in terms of mRNA patent royalties (a very large number I believe), and of course reputationally. Yet, they treated her truly terribly and have never - and it seems like will never - acknowledge it. For example, Sean Grady, mentioned here as the one that essentially cleared out her lab in 2013 without telling her is the chair of neurosurgery at Penn Medicine. Will he apologize? I doubt it.
[+] [-] m_a_g|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tverbeure|2 years ago|reply
The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that harmful side effects were discovered, but due to a bad testing methodology, the results were not nearly as good as they were. The big pharma company recognized the issue, but a revised third round trial would delay the introduction by years, at which time the amount of profits to make from the medicine were considered too low due to patent expiration. So they just dropped it altogether.
It would be too uneconomical for a new company to kickstart the whole approval process again: as soon as the patents expire, other companies would immediately release their generic variant.
End result: millions of potential carriers of the disease won't see the benefit of a medicine that has been shown to work.
[+] [-] waterheater|2 years ago|reply
Good people do exist in academia, but most of them have retired, and the rest put up with it. I have a general belief that, unlike the majority of careers, being a successful academic (and I can't underscore "academic" enough) requires a strong moral compass, historically oriented toward a "Divine Light of Truth" or God, which ever floats your boat. Such is not required in a grant-seeking paradigm.
[+] [-] andrewstuart2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omginternets|2 years ago|reply
What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.
[+] [-] throw_pm23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strangattractor|2 years ago|reply
There is no Nobel for people that run labs that produce the next 10 Nobel winners other than themselves.
[+] [-] spamizbad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derbOac|2 years ago|reply
I'd link to articles about it but right now searching for anything having to do with Texas, coronavirus, and vaccine, is buried in articles about Texas vaccine politics.
But you're right — Karikó's story is textbook, prototypical, and its strength is its greatest weakness, that it's almost abnormally illuminated. We never know about all the other stories out there that aren't lucky enough to be exposed so clearly.
[+] [-] geodel|2 years ago|reply
Having always a suitable opportunity for someone's skillset is impossible.
[+] [-] rewmie|2 years ago|reply
I don't think this problem is exclusive of academia. Anyone in the job market has war stories about ridiculous hiring processes that reject candidates for the most pathetic reasons.
[+] [-] rdiddly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] queuebert|2 years ago|reply
I have no idea how to fix this, but competition needs to be reduced, probably by more guaranteed funding for positions, not just projects, as grants are. This latest military aid package is 2x the entire NIH budget, so surely there is more money for science out there.
[+] [-] ska|2 years ago|reply
The root problem is that (particularly in R1's) the job of raising money to perform the science has devolved somewhat to the level of individual labs and PI's, which creates an incentive that rewards good fundraisers in a much more predictable way than good researchers. In theory this could be addressed by more rigor in the funding agencies review processes, but they aren't resourced to really handle that.
It's like a baby (both in size and impact) version of the problem in US Congress & Senate.
[+] [-] StableAlkyne|2 years ago|reply
As a result, the people in charge of hiring and firing have a self-preserving interest to value grant-earners
It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive.
It would also help lower some of the pressure to publish or perish, since a lot of that comes from the need to chase grants.
[+] [-] Etheryte|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antognini|2 years ago|reply
There's also the old aphorism that tenure committees can't read, but they can count.
[+] [-] Djle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] test77777|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanr88|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BeetleB|2 years ago|reply
Yes, academia (at least STEM) is such that you need to be good at selling something. The difference is that the goal of a startup is to make money, whereas that's not the goal of research.
We could apply the mentality everywhere. Do you want to tell teachers they need to be as good at selling their skills as they are at teaching?
Researchers are there to research. If a theoretical physicist publishes a lot of papers in high quality journals without bringing in money (because they don't need the money to do the research), they'll be denied tenure. Even when doing experimental work: If I bring enough to buy my equipment, and pay for the staff (e.g. students) and publish good papers, I'll be denied tenure if my colleague who is doing very different research is bringing in a lot more money, because he has decided to target that metric.
Researchers need money to do their research. They shouldn't be asked to bring in a lot more than they need.
[+] [-] rawgabbit|2 years ago|reply
Thomas Edison may have been a giant of self promotion. But I would argue Nikola Tesla invented as much or more foundationally important technology we use today. I would argue Tesla like Kariko will never be a wiz at self promotion. But a domain expert should have spotted them early on. I mean isn’t that the job of people who dole out tax payer money for research?
UPDATE. I mixed up Edison and Tesla. Tesla was the champion self promoter.
[+] [-] gustavus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bell-cot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrycoder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hodgesrm|2 years ago|reply
A brilliant woman scientist researching an uncool topic hits the trifecta of resistance to her work. It's wonderful to see her persistence vindicated but it sounds like time for a revolution in how university research is managed. The closing quote of the article is very disappointing.
[+] [-] bell-cot|2 years ago|reply
Agreed...but it was probably time for a revolution 50 years ago. Suffice to say that those actively causing the problems are very widely, deeply, and skillfully entrenched. And willing to fight to the (metaphorical) death in defense of the current system.
Vs...could you tell me how numerous, skilled, and well-armed your hoped-for revolutionary army might be?
[+] [-] wavemode|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw_pm23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senkora|2 years ago|reply
While unpleasant, this is a conversation that is sometimes necessary to have as someone in a position of power communicating to a subordinate.
> In 2013, Karikó said she returned to her lab after spending time away to find all of her belongings having been packed, moved, and misplaced at Grady's direction.
But this is just petty and cruel.
[+] [-] dbmikus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|2 years ago|reply
https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-...
> In 2013—after enduring multiple professional setbacks, one denied grant after another, and a demotion at the institution to which she’d been devoted for decades—Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., walked out of her lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine for the last time.
> That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”
[+] [-] mightyham|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] getpost|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lacker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thimkerbell|2 years ago|reply