Oddbean

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?

@8599d6ab 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 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

@8599d6ab Also blame NIH, though. Seems she never got an R01. Even if high risk, it was, with hindsight, surely worth placing a bet? Hire experts to review the science, not count metrics and follow fashion. That should be the study sections' one job.

@8599d6ab Two possibly contradictory things: 1. More stable research jobs that where people won't get fired for not getting grants (hard money). 2. More grant funding. I don't think the issue is specifically about funding high-risk, high-reward. It's that we have little clue what research will be high reward and the more research that's funded the more likely some will lead to major discoveries. The trouble is that increases in overall grant funding leads to places like UPenn creating more soft-money positions. A big Q for me is how to give universities an incentive to internally support more stable jobs.

@8599d6ab all good thoughts here. I would add giving people more ways to evaluate based on potential rather than output. I think it has to be balanced, but how many times have we heard that we can’t get funded to do the thing, until we’ve actually done the thing?