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Comment by amirkdv | Hacker News Reader

Great post!

A non-technical detail that the post misses is the human story here. Katalin Kariko, the biochemist that pioneered the idea of delivering vaccines in mRNA form, got nothing but rejections for her grant applications for this very idea and was eventually demoted from tenure track at U Penn.

Whatever you think of this, it's a misleading understatement to describe it as:

> As with other fundamental scientific research we are now reaping the benefits of, the discoverers of this technique had to fight to get their work funded and then accepted.

From the article[0] the post itself cites:

> By 1995, after six years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Karikó got demoted. She had been on the path to full professorship, but with no money coming in to support her work on mRNA, her bosses saw no point in pressing on.

[0]: https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-...

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There is a common thread in many discussions (esp. on Reddit) creating a false dichotomy between the greedy private sector and the taxpayer-funded basic research that comes with all the important new ideas.

While not an entirely false picture, the real situation is far from that clear and scientific struggles of Katalin Karikó, who finally left the academia for private sector (she is now a vice president in BioNTech, one of the vaccine-producing corporations) is an illustration of the perils of the contemporary grant systems.

Truly revolutionary concepts are often indistingushable from bullshit. At least from the grant committee point of view. Your best chance to snap up a grant is to come with a project of marginal improvement that produces one or two papers in a reliable timeframe.

Marginal improvements have their indisputable value, but they mostly appeal to risk-averse people; whoever wants to work on something really outlandish, must rely on other sources of financing, often private. After all, there is a risk of utter failure = not producing even that one paper that is, these days, a basic unit of wealth in the Publish-or-Perish world. Or of a delay that breaks the original time plan.

>There is a common thread in many discussions (esp. on Reddit) creating a false dichotomy between the greedy private sector and the taxpayer-funded basic research that comes with all the important new ideas.

Well, in the modern world we have both a greedy private sector and a greedy academia...

>Whatever you think of this, it's a misleading understatement to describe it as:

It might be an "understatement" but it's hardly misleading. You make it sound like the author intentionally dissed them by downplaying the story.

The technique eventually did end up funded and accepted. And she still made millions (from the license), will get a Nobel soon (I predict - there's alredy pressure for that), plus, her story will 99% be made into a movie sometime in the next 20-30 years (I also predict).

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