How do we support the Katalin Karikó's?
There's a lot of reasonable outrage today around how Katalin Karikó was treated throughout her career (full disclosure: by my employer, UPenn). Obviously a number of someones made a huge mistake by not recognizing the brilliance and potential of her work - no question there!
What I've been thinking about and I'd love to get some scenius input on: how could we, as an academic community, do better?
Here's one summary of what happened:
https://billypenn.com/2020/12/29/university-pennsylvania-covid-vaccine-mrna-kariko-demoted-biontech-pfizer/
Taking seriously the notion that 1) we want to support the Katalin Karikó's, 2) high-risk, high-reward research takes time, and 3) everyone needs to go through a job evaluation at some point, here are a few ideas:
*) Better support to help geniuses communicate (and fund) their ideas.
*) More funding for high-risk, high-reward projects
*) A longer evaluation period for individuals engaged in high-risk/high-reward research
What would you add/change?
Philly scientist behind COVID vaccine tech was demoted by UPenn, yet she persisted
Dismissed by many, Dr. Katalin Karikó remained passionate about mRNA therapeutics.Michaela Winberg (Billy Penn at WHYY)
Albert Cardona
in reply to Nicole Rust • • •The root of the issue is the model of academic funding, positions and evaluation.
2 or 3 year grants are ridiculous, particularly if it takes another 2 or 3 years to even get them to begin with. Even 5 year grants are ridiculous. Abolish grants. If an experimentalist faculty position doesn't come with core funding to begin with, it's like a guarantee of wasted time and effort.
Just like grants don't need to be big, core funding doesn't need to be big either. Large sums stifle innovation, prevent creativity, foster more of the same at scale rather than new approaches. Large sums in research are like hidden transfers of research funds to companies, i.e., to purchase large equipment or contract out software engineering, instead of clever yet slow development in house. Lean teams with the freedom and security to be able to run for years please.
Spread the risk, diversify the portfolio, remain focused on core competencies. If 19 professors don't accomplish much other than reasonably good undergraduate teaching and modest research findings or none at all, and the 20th
... show moreThe root of the issue is the model of academic funding, positions and evaluation.
2 or 3 year grants are ridiculous, particularly if it takes another 2 or 3 years to even get them to begin with. Even 5 year grants are ridiculous. Abolish grants. If an experimentalist faculty position doesn't come with core funding to begin with, it's like a guarantee of wasted time and effort.
Just like grants don't need to be big, core funding doesn't need to be big either. Large sums stifle innovation, prevent creativity, foster more of the same at scale rather than new approaches. Large sums in research are like hidden transfers of research funds to companies, i.e., to purchase large equipment or contract out software engineering, instead of clever yet slow development in house. Lean teams with the freedom and security to be able to run for years please.
Spread the risk, diversify the portfolio, remain focused on core competencies. If 19 professors don't accomplish much other than reasonably good undergraduate teaching and modest research findings or none at all, and the 20th hits it big enough to pay back for the whole lot of them and beyond: that's a win. Universities are meant to teach in the first place. Patents and discoveries are a plus.
Stop the metrics. Not only they've long fallen prey to Goodhart's law, it's also that, fundamentally, the number of publications doesn't matter. And citations of a publication don't matter. What matters is real world impact, which takes time, and can't be measured with convenient yet short-term focused and profoundly misleading tools that the likes of #RELX peddle to academic departments, relying heavily on numbers of publications and citations.
#academia
Chloé Azencott
in reply to Albert Cardona • • •Albert Cardona
in reply to Chloé Azencott • • •So true – it's nigh impossible to weigh the impact of research but years afterwards. Ask the microbiologists who were studying extremophile bacteria in a Yellowstone pond whether they thought their work would lead to the sequencing of the human genome and modern medicine as we know it. Or ask the zoologists who pulled out bioluminescent and fluorescent jelly fish out of the sea whether they thought scientific research in developmental biology, neuroscience and biology as a whole, remarkably even DNA sequencing, would be so thoroughly transformed. And these are just two examples in biology.
PCR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction#History
GFP: jellyfish Aequorea victoria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_fluorescent_protein#Wild-type_GFP_(wtGFP)
#academia #science
Protein that converts blue and ultraviolet light ranges to green light.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)@AllenNeuroLab
in reply to Albert Cardona • • •