Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
It’s why I left academia. You aren’t rewarded for being a good scientist. You’re rewarded for being good at understanding funding trends and playing the nepotism game. Grant writing is less important than talking to program officers and having big names write letters for you, and have your readers know those names.
However I’ll say that after spending 5 years in industry, these people have no fucking idea what they’re doing and it’s hilarious. Higher quality of science in academia. But I’m getting paid now.
All best old-school emeritus professors I met in my life were absolutely certain they wouldn’t have had a career in modern academia.
This story doesn’t surprise an unfortunately
Yep: Even really good non-emeritus professors get shafted. Best professor I ever had was in grad school and he basically got screwed out of a job. He’s now working in the private sector making waaaay more money. He was a legitimate genius and that university lost a lot when he left. I feel like we as a society are becoming increasingly short-sighted, or maybe we always were and I’m just now starting to realize it.
Still, weird how the guy got funding and a chair while she got no funding, a demotion and forced early retirement. Funny* how that happens.
*not funny at all
Why?
If you read the article you find out. Unfortunately this kind of stories are the norm of modern academia
Could have been different reasons.
What? The reason is that academia does not rewards competency and innovative research. It rewards ability to gather funds, and to streamline paper production. Professors nowadays are often “technically” average, but extremely good startup ceos
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Biochemist Katalin Karikó and immunologist Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Monday for their foundational research showing that chemical modifications to the molecular building blocks of messenger RNA (mRNA) could enable its use for therapeutics and vaccines—a realization crucial to the rapid development of the life-saving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during the deadly pandemic.
In our cells, mRNA is an intermediate molecule, a single-stranded copy of coding from the genes in our DNA blueprints that is then translated into functional proteins.
She could not win scientific grants to fund her work and, in 1995, after years of toiling, her bosses at UPenn gave her the choice of either leaving or getting demoted.
Around the same time, other researchers found evidence that some key proteins that regulate inflammation—toll-like receptors (TLRs)—specifically detect modifications on DNA and RNA to trigger inflammation responses.
However, the finding received little fanfare among much of the scientific community at the time, and Karikó’s research and contribution continued to go largely unappreciated before the pandemic.
“Ten years ago, I was here in October, because I was kicked out from Penn, was forced to retire,” she said in an early morning interview Monday with the Nobel Assembly.
The original article contains 711 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
