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 but 2) high-risk, high-reward research takes time, 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?
@NicoleCRust STAT had an interesting op piece on this last year https://www.statnews.com/2022/02/01/kariko-problem-lessons-funding-basic-research/
@cyrilpedia
My answer? Bend over backward to fund a more diverse range of people and ideas, even deliberately including ideas that are currently perceived as unpopular, unworkable, obscure, and the like. After all, many scientific discoveries can be traced back to origins that didn’t seem promising — like CRISPR, which began with a Spanish study on salt-loving archaebacteria in 1993 — or even to ideas that are actively opposed by the establishment.
To be sure, the success rate of this approach might be low. But if we funded 10,000 people who looked like a younger Karikó, and only one of them did something that would have the impact of her mRNA research, that would be well worth it.