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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

#111

Post by ccooffee »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #31
queuebert wrote: post #12

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 mo…

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-…

> 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.

From what I've seen in very limited searches, universities claim that the 30-60% overhead/administrative costs are to account for things like employee benefits, utility costs, building maintenance, and the like. The stated money pits all make sense to me, but I don't see how it actually comes up to those numbers.

Do you know if these costs are ever itemized by universities? That's probably a necessary first step before NSF/NIH would consider a rule to avoid paying opaque overhead costs. (Though I fear it would lead to absurd equipment rental fees or something of the sort. "You want to use a test tube? $3 per day per tube!")

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

stavros wrote: post #107
exmadscientist wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are removing conditions ("strings") from federal grant money and simultaneously taking a large cut to fund the university's general operations. They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.

Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by ceejayoz »

My favorite little bit about all this:

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.”

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

#114

Post by HansHamster »

stavros wrote: post #107
exmadscientist wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are removing conditions ("strings") from federal grant money and simultaneously taking a large cut to fund the university's general operations. They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.

Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.

The grant has restrictions on how the money can be used and the university takes a sizeable chunk of this (because they can). Then out of generosity and the pure kindness of their heart they might give you back a small chunk of that sum without the same restrictions.

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

#115

Post by vineyardmike »

stavros wrote: post #107
exmadscientist wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are removing conditions ("strings") from federal grant money and simultaneously taking a large cut to fund the university's general operations. They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.

Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.

It’s not laundering money in the criminal sense, it’s just removing restrictions and contractual limitations.

If I’m a grant giver, I want my money to go towards the consumables of research, not fund CapEx that can be used for someone else’s research. If I’m a lab, I want/need fancy and reusable equipment, which is excluded in the grant terms.

Some of the grant money goes to “university administration” (pick your term) because the university gets a cut. The university administration pays salaries, endowments, whatever with that money. They also buy that durable equipment that was excluded in the contract from their “general fund”, washing the connection to the original grant.

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

#116

Post by ceejayoz »

d--b wrote: post #79

Well the fact is that she remained at Penn for 30+ years, so clearly it couldn't be that horrible. And there she made some groundbreaking discoveries that contributed to the COVID vaccine and she got a Nobel Prize, so she probably did get some people behind her. University politics are terrible, but in this very case, whatever happened, it turned out pretty good for both her and the University.

> Well the fact is that she remained at Penn for 30+ years, so clearly it couldn't be that horrible.

People stay married to abusive partners for decades, too.

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

#117

Post by bachmeier »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #97
KennyBlanken wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money. First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can…

Regarding your first point, was the parent comment edited or did you miss this part as they clearly address this issue: > (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Parent comment isn't making the claim that "schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money." Rather bemoaning the fact that academic success (and even entry into the fie…

I think they were probably replying to exmadscientist, not thelittlenag.

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

#118

Post by stavros »

vineyardmike wrote: post #115
stavros wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.

It’s not laundering money in the criminal sense, it’s just removing restrictions and contractual limitations. If I’m a grant giver, I want my money to go towards the consumables of research, not fund CapEx that can be used for someone else’s research. If I’m a lab, I want/need fancy and reusable equipment, which is excluded in the grant terms. Some of the grant money goes to “university administration” (pick your ter…

Ahh I see what you mean, thanks for explaining.

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

#119

Post by burnished »

stavros wrote: post #107
exmadscientist wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are removing conditions ("strings") from federal grant money and simultaneously taking a large cut to fund the university's general operations. They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.

Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.

I'm not an expert so a pinch of salt is warranted but:

When you give some one money with legally recognized conditions then the organization has to honor those conditions. e.g donate money to a charity and tell them that it is to be used purchasing pens then that is all that money can be used for.

So if I understand correctly the 'scheme' here is that Lab A applies for and receives a grant that has stipulation X. As part of this process a portion of that grant goes to the hosting university without that stipulation. The university is free to spend that money however they wish, including providing some funds to Lab A for things that they really need but were not provided for under the grant.

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

#120

Post by waterheater »

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 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.

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