Nicole RustOct 2, 2023

How do we support the Katalin Karikó's?

There's a lot of reasonable outrage today around how Katalin Karikó was treated throughout her career (full disclosure: by my employer, UPenn). Obviously a number of someones made a huge mistake by not recognizing the brilliance and potential of her work - no question there!

What I've been thinking about and I'd love to get some scenius input on: how could we, as an academic community, do better?

Here's one summary of what happened:
https://billypenn.com/2020/12/29/university-pennsylvania-covid-vaccine-mrna-kariko-demoted-biontech-pfizer/

Taking seriously the notion that 1) we want to support the Katalin Karikó's, 2) high-risk, high-reward research takes time, and 3) everyone needs to go through a job evaluation at some point, here are a few ideas:

*) Better support to help geniuses communicate (and fund) their ideas.
*) More funding for high-risk, high-reward projects
*) A longer evaluation period for individuals engaged in high-risk/high-reward research

What would you add/change?

Philly scientist behind COVID vaccine tech was demoted by UPenn, yet she persisted

Dismissed by many, Dr. Katalin Karikó remained passionate about mRNA therapeutics.

Billy Penn at WHYY
Show threadDan Handwerker

@NicoleCRust Two possibly contradictory things: 1. More stable research jobs where people won't get fired for not getting grants (hard money). 2. More grant funding.

I don't think the issue is specifically about funding high-risk, high-reward. It's that we have little clue what research will be high reward and the more research that's funded the more likely some will lead to major discoveries.

The trouble is that increases in overall grant funding leads to places like UPenn creating more soft-money positions. A big Q for me is how to give universities an incentive to internally support more stable jobs.

Oct 3, 2023 at 2:13pmWeb