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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

#51

Post by Const-me »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #9
m_a_g wrote: post #3

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

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’m not familiar with science, but I don’t believe things are terribly bad for engineers. Brilliant innovative engineers have a degree of control over their lives.

If a person is unhappy about the bureaucracy of the large org they can find another job in a startup. Or they can find a better job in a smaller, better managed organization. Or if they’re feeling lucky, they can even start their own business.

If they currently hold a senior position in FAANG working on innovative ways to sell more ads, that step will likely involve a substantial pay cut. Still, IMO brilliant engineers are relatively well-compensated across the whole industry. The work they do normally generates a lot of value for the employer.

They should be generally fine financially even without these millions of stock options. And they will be probably happier working on the innovations which do something good, as opposed to inventing models, methods, and apparatuses to advance the ongoing enshittification of the internet.

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

#52

Post by raincom »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #34
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…

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.

This tells us that too many people chase these jobs. Maybe, time to hire as many as possible using basic income scheme.

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

#53

Post by shepherdjerred »

RecycledEle wrote: post #17

I wish every disagreement was logged in a system so that, decades later, we could know who was right and who was wrong. It would tell us who to listen to and who yo shun. I had hopes that Internet forums would be that record, but the nukers destroyed that.

That sounds incredibly dystopian.

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

#54

Post by przemub »

rawgabbit wrote: post #41
wavemode wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yeah, the allowed kind of racism. My favourite.

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

#55

Post by zamalek »

My experience in university convinced me that: modern universities are not institutions of learning or discovery, they are businesses and are only concerned about the bottom line. As always, enshittification follows (and arguably happened a long time ago already). That includes amazing short-term decision making at the cost of long-term sustainability.

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

#56

Post by exmadscientist »

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…

> 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)

Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the money for you through a kickback from its overhead cut, at the tiny tiny price of keeping most of it. You may then spend the kickbacks without restriction.

The whole system is insane. Even having lived it for years I barely believe some of my own stories.

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

#57

Post by s1artibartfast »

Unpopular opinion, but this was a reasonable outcome from the university.

If a researcher makes a great discovery, but can’t get funding to do anything with it, You don’t keep them around not making progress.

They got pushed out, found funding, and finally furthered the technology.

It is unclear if more scientific progress would have been made if they were kept at penn without funding.

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

#58

Post by ModernMech »

staunton wrote: post #16
bee_rider wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was he a good teacher?

Maybe that should play a role for getting university "teaching" positions but it doesn't. Neither did it play a role for Einstein.

Being a good teacher absolutely plays a role in teaching positions. Source: I work in such a teaching position and have served on several search committees.

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

#59

Post by queuebert »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #29
ska wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really quality vs quantity. 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 resour…

But it's even worse than that. Since universities are funded by the grant overhead (30-40% of the grant goes directly to the university, sometimes higher), there's an incentive for "expensive" research. Why fund a theorist who needs a pencil and paper and maybe a fancy computer when you can fund an expensive lab full of state of the art lasers and optics or any other type of expensive technology. Do you want to come…

The overhead rate for R1s is closer to 70%.

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

#60

Post by Almondsetat »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #24
drno123 wrote: post #6

If there wasn’t COVID pandemic, and mRNA vaccines did not become widely used for another decade, ms Kariko would never get the deserved recognition.

* Dr. Karikó

are we in the 1700s? being a PhD does not mean I have to use your honorific every time you are mentioned
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