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'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

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Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#41

Post by rawgabbit »

wavemode wrote: post #26
hodgesrm wrote: post #2

> “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…

woman, uncool topic... is the third factor of the trifecta "scientist"? or "brilliant"?

She was admonished for speaking in her native Hungarian.

In any organization, there are the publicized metrics and rules. And then there are the hidden rules which are nothing more than office politics. Do I expect UPenn to change its behavior? I would not hold my breath. The real question is why we hold Ivy League universities on a pedestal.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#42

Post by karaterobot »

gustavus wrote: post #7

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"

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#43

Post by omginternets »

m_a_g wrote: post #3

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

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.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#44

Post by smath »

ilaksh wrote: post #4

So what are the repercussions for the admins who misjudged or mistreated her? If there aren't sufficient changes then maybe groups should move their funding out of Penn.

This was my immediate thought too. We need perhaps a long lived website that captures misjudgement on the part of people in power and update their scores over a long period of time. A kind of public record, ledger. A kind of wikipedia, but simplified only to record +1s, -1s against their name, and the reason for it.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#45

Post by spamizbad »

m_a_g wrote: post #3

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

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.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#46

Post by Kye »

thelittlenag wrote: post #32

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" re…

Was it always like this or headed here? I'm curious if flat government funding for research against rising costs creates or amplifies counterproductive incentives.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#47

Post by mightyham »

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?

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#48

Post by rawgabbit »

seanr88 wrote: post #36

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.

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.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#49

Post by raincom »

thelittlenag wrote: post #32

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" re…

Your wife is on tenure-track and Kariko was on a lower track designed for postdocs, researchers, leading to research assistant/associate professor, etc. Kariko was treated badly on the track she was on——a track that doesn’t require stringent filtering. So your comment is not that relevant.

Re: 'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Katalin Karikó

#50

Post by tverbeure »

m_a_g wrote: post #3

This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.

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.

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