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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

#211

Post by AlbertCory »

waterheater wrote: post #120
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 comple…

I was at a talk at 3Com by an MIT professor that Metcalfe knew. He made the old joke that "academic politics are so vicious because nothing's at stake."

The prof said, "that depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing'. "

So there you have your reason: anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards.

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

#212

Post by tverbeure »

noobermin wrote: post #82
tverbeure wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 har…

Is there any recourse? Like can the research group claw back the IP and give it to another company?

It was given back to the original developer. But nobody is willing to invest in getting it to market.

This is a case where a non-profit would be useful.

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

#213

Post by BeetleB »

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.

Not a very helpful sentence in the context.

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.

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

#214

Post by josephcsible »

tverbeure wrote: post #209
wolf550e wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a patent, the formula is not secret. Someone needs to pay for the work to get it approved by the FDA.

I thought that the formula was not secret, but that's actually not the case: apparently, patents like this are written so that they cover a whole class of molecules without specifying exactly which one, or something of that sort. (I forgot the details.)

Why is it legal for patents to be like that? Wasn't the premise of them supposed to be "we'll fully disclose the details of this thing in exchange for a temporary monopoly on making it"?

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

#215

Post by gedy »

ubermonkey wrote: post #193
waterheater wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tea…

U of Austin is having difficulty because it's defined from the jump as a right-wing institution.

I'm honestly interested in what defines them as "right wing". All I'm seeing is media describe them as "anti-woke" and "anti-cancel culture".

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

#216

Post by jackmott »

gedy wrote: post #215
ubermonkey wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U of Austin is having difficulty because it's defined from the jump as a right-wing institution.

I'm honestly interested in what defines them as "right wing". All I'm seeing is media describe them as "anti-woke" and "anti-cancel culture".

[dead]

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

#217

Post by tombert »

fritzo wrote: post #189
tombert wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad used to be a full time professor of aerospace engineering. He liked the research, and he didn't mind teaching, but he quit after a few years because he absolutely hated having to play "salesman" all the time. He found himself seeing everyone as "potential funding", and he personally found it kind of hard to turn that mentality off. He went back to industry after that, which has its share of legitimate problems…

Is that true that aerospace engineers are not expected to act as sales people? I've certainly found that in software, engineers who don't sell their work get reassigned or laid off.

I can't speak for most engineers (and I really can't speak for my dad either), but I think my dad is in a more researchey position at a BigCo. I think he does do proposals but I think a majority of his time is research now.

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

#218

Post by [deleted] »

gedy wrote: post #215
ubermonkey wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U of Austin is having difficulty because it's defined from the jump as a right-wing institution.

I'm honestly interested in what defines them as "right wing". All I'm seeing is media describe them as "anti-woke" and "anti-cancel culture".

[deleted]

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

#220

Post by blululu »

godelski wrote: post #92
Kye wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of…

We have been increasing funding for 50 years and the problem has not been fixed. America currently sets the record in science funding (in raw amount and percentage of gdp) for any society in History and it seems to have these issues. Even if increasing funding would solve the problem, it is, at best, a short term fix. So long as there is growth in the system you can hide a lot of blight and rot. There is enough to go around so the zero sum bad actors don’t take the full pie. But the long problem with such a solution is that you cannot increase funding indefinitely. At somepoint there is a limit to how much money society can allocate to these projects. We need to make our spending work properly.
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