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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like she was not able to raise the money to continue her research. That’s not really UPenn’s fault. No one can know in advance which ideas are promising enough, so it isn’t reasonable to blame them.

This isn’t a scandal or an embarrassment. If, after working for decades, no one is willing to fund you, it’s kind of expected that they have to cut their losses at some point. She was apparently working on it for over 20 years! It turned out that all of the grant money and VC money didn’t see the right risk/value potential in it, so they declined to provide their money, but BioNTech did and hired her as a VP. I suspect this ended much better for her than staying at Penn would have.

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Isn't it slightly embarrassing that we:

a) can't predict the impact of most research programs very well but

b) make pretty drastic decisions based on them, and

c) [for Penn specifically], never revisit those decisions.

Her publication record from 2005 onwards is pretty solid: Immunity and Nature papers with a thousand citations each, an out-licensed patent, and a bunch of other papers too.

It probably wouldn't kill anyone for UPenn to say "The value/success of her work wasn't obvious to our P&T committee at the time" or something vaguely apologetic.

>It probably wouldn't kill anyone for UPenn to say "The value/success of her work wasn't obvious to our P&T committee at the time" or something vaguely apologetic.

Yes! UPenn needs to publicly own up to their short-sightedness and apologize to the researcher. If you want the bouquets you should also be ready for the brickbats.

An institution of the prestige UPenn aspires to is supposed to provide research leadership, and not just be a place for VCs to subcontract their work.

That’s great, but assuming she (and everyone else working on research that they felt was important) expected to be paid, the money has to come from somewhere, right? Tuition costs are already too high and we are calling in the government to pay for student loans. So what do people expect? Obviously with a crystal ball they probably would have kept her funded (if this is even the full story - and it probably isn’t), but we shouldn’t blame them for not having one. 20+ years with no takers sounds like a pretty fair shake. Are they just supposed to fund everyone indefinitely so they can never be accused of missing something good?

Not even VCs have a great track record at picking winners, and they do this for a living.

> Are they just supposed to fund everyone indefinitely so they can never be accused of missing something good?

No, of course not - that is just an unhelpful false-dichotomy straw man reply (like the whole of wuwuno's).

The issue of funding both fundamental research and that which lacks a pathway to short-term profitability is a difficult one, much more subtle than you presented in your original post, where getting VC funding was presented as the sole criterion that mattered (the point of view given in that post amounted to saying that delegating all decisions to VCs was the proper way to go about it.)

One of the reasons vaccine reasearch hasn't been attracting a lot of VC funding is that vaccines are not nearly the money-makers that drugs and tests are. We're lucky that some research was kept going despite this, and the lesson from that is that we should not trust in VC funding being the predominant determinant of funding.

So they should fund all research for all time?

No, that's not reasonable. I know, they should just fund the research that will eventually be proven to be ground breaking. Seems pretty straight forward. Of course they are dependent on the research at Penn for the crystal ball.

> It sounds like she was not able to raise the money to continue her research. That’s not really UPenn’s fault. No one can know in advance which ideas are promising enough, so it isn’t reasonable to blame them.

As one had wrote 2-3 grant proposal during graduate studies, my takeaway is that the system failed to give the really impactful ideas the right amount of resources.

That's matching a 2-day-old submission [1] about peer-reviewed research papers are becoming boring, as another sign that the existing research management systems are not producing interesting results, even just from reading the papers, which presumably is already the most interesting thing can be produced from a research project.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605156

It seems like having the scientists do their own fundraising is the wrong way to do things. You'd have to be an expert in both the science and the fundraising, to compete against the other scientists who are fundraising. Obviously, since learning how to raise funds competes with learning and developing the science, this system is going to prioritize greater-skilled-fundraisers/lesser-skilled scientists. If you're a great fundraiser, why do you even need the University?

That makes sense, but if you’re a fundraiser and not a scientist, how do you evaluate the claims and the potential for every project that wants you to raise for them? If that were my job, I’d have no idea how to tell a Theranos apart from what this research was, other than going with my personal rule of favoring the one who doesn’t put on a fake voice.

But there is a limited supply of money, and someone has to figure out how to get the right amount to the right people for the right length of time. If you know how to do that, I’ll definitely fund you, and every project you recommend!

> If you're a great fundraiser, why do you even need the University?

Because funds don't cover certain operational costs. You also lease lab space/equipment/staff from the university, etc.

Everyone can identify problems with the existing model, its rather difficult to propose workable solutions!

shouldn't it be the university administration's job to find funding and allocate it? sure nobody can know the future, but people in positions of power should at least understand the potential results and implications of the projects they decide to terminate or support. researchers themselves shouldn't have to waste time essentially paying rent to a parasitic bureaucracy.

If you've never published you should be banned from discussing this topic at all, the dunning krueger effect is infuriating for such an integral part of human progress.

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