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Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

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Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#81

Post by ghaff »

bnralt wrote: post #75
raziel2701 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been a question I have no answer to: What do we do with all these smart people? Currently most just go inside hierarchical workplaces where they have to learn to play office politics and carry out meaningless job functions in exchange for financial security. We don't have a Bell labs anymore, science is getting more expensive and most of the venture capital money goes to software rather than to the more capita…

It seems like this is exactly the kind of thing that a government is useful for. Why not have more publicly funded research institutions that employ them, and put them to work on useful research without having them worry about grant considerations, teaching classes, or the publishing treadmill?

It sounds like you're replacing grant writing with a win the government research funding for life lottery which obviously an improvement. That said, there is some of that in the national labs although they need to worry about program funding like everywhere else. (Though military programs in particular are pretty secure.)

Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#82

Post by gww »

yholio wrote: post #35
tchalla wrote: post #8

Here’s a prior article and HN thread on “Managing Academia” and it’s conclusion. > If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021885

Please, that's such a copout. To "hire good people" you need to 1. attract and 2. identify them. If you don't create attractive conditions, good people will go elsewhere; if you do offer, say, financial incentives and personal prestige, bad people will flock too, so you need to identify good people. Further, the whole show is dynamic, good people can turn bad if wrong incentives exist, or you can lose them if more at…

This is particularly a problem for academic labs looking for bioinformatics specialists. Many of the bioinformatians I know with strong stats backgrounds have taken jobs at banks etc where the pay and benefits are significantly better. It's hard for academics to offer their staff something competitive to retain them. Moreover, people are realizing that so much of medical research is less about the patients and more about using their samples to get big papers with little impact on their prognosis

Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#83

Post by kaitai »

thayne wrote: post #29

I am a casualty of this. I was originally intending to follow an academic career, until I discovered that my career would be dependent on my ability to secure grants. Something that if I was not bad at (which I think is unlikely), would at least be extremely stressful for me. It isn't the only reason I decided to to switch to being a software engineer, but it is a major reason.

Yep, I finally landed my first grant as a co-PI two months after I left academia for corporate data sci. Amusingly, or whatever, of the three grants I had up for review as a co-PI or contributor, two finally got funded -- but I was gone.

Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#84

Post by wizzwizz4 »

IQunder130 wrote: post #67
throwaw4ybio wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the system gets corrupted, a second group of scientists will emerge who claim to be the real deal. Let them battle it out and choose the smarter group for further funding. Would this involve an application? Perhaps a committee?

Sometimes I wonder if the people making "why don't they just ... " type comments even bother to read what they have written.

Why doesn't someone just make a browser extension that forces you to read the contents of your comment before you submit it? Then we just bundle it in browsers.

Edit: Hmm, seems I plagiarised https://xkcd.com/481/, but worse. I'm glad I rarely write the first thing that comes into my head.

Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#85

Post by jpeloquin »

shadowgovt wrote: post #39

When I hear a story like this, the first thing I want to know about is how the incentives are structured. The author makes a great point, which is that medical research is expected to pay its own way. So the next question I'm looking to answer is "Why is that?" What is it about the way we structure this research that made it make sense to U Penn to underfund mRNA research?

Not all medical research works exactly as described in the article. Reading between the lines, Dr. Karikó had what's called a "research faculty" appointment, which basically means you don't need to teach but do need to pay your salary (and the salary of anyone employed in your lab) from grants. This is sometimes called a "soft money" position to reflect its precarious nature. This is in contrast to standing faculty, who are paid 9 months of their salary from the university operating budget, but must teach during those 9 months, leaving less time for research. The research faculty appointments exist because NIH grant money is plentiful, allowing more positions to exist than can be supported from the university operating budget alone. Essentially, researchers are permitted to bet their job on their ability to obtain grant money. Turn off the supply of grant money and the research faculty positions go away too. Most would not be replaced by standing faculty positions.

The depressing reality is that it is mostly impossible to predict which basic research projects will prove to be essential in 25 years. I think people try anyway because basing funding awards / rejections on a nominally objective evaluation of project importance lends some emotional distance to the process.

If hospitals were paid by patient outcome instead by procedure, it may create a financial incentive to use some of the organization's operating budget for applied research. But that wouldn't do much to help basic research with unclear future application such as the mRNA work.

https://catalog.upenn.edu/faculty-handbook/ii/ii-b/

Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#86

Post by MattGaiser »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #74
MattGaiser wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would rightfully mock a company that said that its turnover problem, its innovation problem, or its project failure problem was due to a lack of courage among its workers.

But your idea that science is a company is a grossly inadequate metaphor. That's not what science is!

So what would you compare it to then? The startup ecosystem?

Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#87

Post by odyssey7 »

cal5k wrote: post #72
raziel2701 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been a question I have no answer to: What do we do with all these smart people? Currently most just go inside hierarchical workplaces where they have to learn to play office politics and carry out meaningless job functions in exchange for financial security. We don't have a Bell labs anymore, science is getting more expensive and most of the venture capital money goes to software rather than to the more capita…

Maybe we don't need all those PhDs, and we should stop funnelling public money into producing an excess supply of them?

We do need the PhDs (or otherwise trained researchers). It’s the universities that don’t.

Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#88

Post by earhart »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #60
odyssey7 wrote: post #56

Is it counterproductive that we expect researchers to work in universities and become professors? It seems like there should be more outlets for the calling. Our universities are proving to be a bottleneck. I see how there is an often-natural relationship between cultivating knowledge and disseminating it to students. However, we need and have more prospective researchers than universities are willing or able to supp…

The issue is that there are too many barriers to commercialisation and the current stakeholders have too much power. The profitable fields like medicine strictly limit the number of people accepted (the official explanation is that there aren't enough residencies, the unspoken reason is that the American Medical Association wants to keep salaries up) and FDA drug approval laws err on the side of caution; better to ha…

A close friend of mine made a career out of shepherding drugs through the FDA approval process. They’ve stated multiple times that in their professional experience, every single regulation is there because some asshat tried to cut corners so they could profit from snake oil.

Additionally, the RNA vaccines were somewhat novel. In the future, maybe (hopefully!) we’ll be able to speed up the process, but for now, do you really want to give the entire population an experimental substance, with no tracking, with our woeful medical system, and see how it turns out, hoping to get lucky? Bearing in mind that the number of people you’d have to vaccinate for herd immunity is much larger than the number of people who’re likely to have a problem from Covid-19?

I do grok that bureaucrats are incentivized to follow the precautionary principle, simply because people equate actions to responsibilities for outcomes and don’t tend to weight inaction so heavily. But overall, I’m really glad the FDA was so careful, and because of that care, I’ll happily get the shot once it’s available to low-risk people like myself; I’m very pro-vaccines, but even I wouldn’t have taken it a year ago.

Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#89

Post by itronitron »

odyssey7 wrote: post #56

Is it counterproductive that we expect researchers to work in universities and become professors? It seems like there should be more outlets for the calling. Our universities are proving to be a bottleneck. I see how there is an often-natural relationship between cultivating knowledge and disseminating it to students. However, we need and have more prospective researchers than universities are willing or able to supp…

I doubt that most researchers work in universities. Every large product company (food, pharma, automotive, gaming) has multiple research groups, and while they tend to be very small relative to the larger company they are probably much bigger than most academic departments.

Re: Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

#90

Post by avereveard »

thayne wrote: post #29

I am a casualty of this. I was originally intending to follow an academic career, until I discovered that my career would be dependent on my ability to secure grants. Something that if I was not bad at (which I think is unlikely), would at least be extremely stressful for me. It isn't the only reason I decided to to switch to being a software engineer, but it is a major reason.

it's worse than that, especially at the beginning it is not your ability to receive grants that matters, but the ability to sycophant for the person that control the grant flows.
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