Philly scientist behind COVID vaccine tech was demoted by UPenn
billypenn.com
billypenn.com
Nonetheless an impressive story of conviction and perseverance. Penn has decades-old egg on its face, rather than months-old fresh egg.
https://biontech.de/sites/default/files/2019-08/20140202_Bio...
I mean this is really the ABCs of modern business.
edit: Also very curious about the "attempt to have her deported" as I've heard of many threats of that nature against foreign post-docs.
Very right! I fear that the cancer of "shortsighted quick returns" in the Research field has been the death of many a talented researcher. Research/Education should really be treated very differently from Industry/Productization and the same yardstick should not be applied to both.
Working with synthetic mRNA was hard during my time. I would imagine that it was many times more difficult in the 90's. Just as an EE analogy, working on mRNA in the 90s is like working on extreme UV lithography in the 80s. It was too far into the future to be useful, and there were better research funding opportunities for other things. But if one was smart, one could see the potential. It's not so surprising that she got passed for tenure, working on something so crazy wild. It was around 2005-2010 time frame when mRNA synthesis became affordable enough to become an applied science rather than basic research.
It sounds like Kariko lost her associate professor position in the 90s, but continued her work as a postdoc for more than 10 years. That's some awesome dedication to something that almost nobody thought would work out. It's not so surprising she jumped ship around 2010 when the mRNA tech caught up.
I hope she gets her Nobel prize. She deserves it.
Only through good fortune did SARS flame out.
Im in SA and the new strain is the real deal. Four people I know have perished in one week. I don't even know who to call or what to say.
I have not seen any research that the new strains are more deadly, only that they are more infectious.
It is not enough to write something and promise to link a source later.
But now that mRNA vaccines have been proven, they might be mass distributed in about 9 months in a future pandemic.
You realize such a delay would mean many more people would die not to mention the overall damage to society from lockdowns? I can’t understand how that would possibly be not “too bad.”
Science really came through this time. We not only had a new vaccine platform that arrived just in time (mRNA), but our conventional vaccine development was also able to get a good vaccine out much sooner than scientists originally thought.
> You realize such a delay would mean many more people would die not to mention the overall damage to society from lockdowns?
Yes.
> I can’t understand how that would possibly be not “too bad.”
Compare it to not having a vaccine ever.
https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...
Also the population would have been younger, with fewer vitamin-D deficient migrants.
It would have been explained as a very bad flu season.
If you don't trust me perhaps you'll listen to Donald Trump, who told Bob Woodward in early February 2020: "And so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.... This is more deadly,” he said. “This is five per — you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent, you know. So, this is deadly stuff.”
For example, COVID's current "death rate" estimate is ~3x worse than flu. Versus Trump's "~5x" in your quote from Feb 2020¹.
People love to argue about such overall rates but for practical purposes, they're too crude a hammer – too aggregate, too high-level to be actionable. More importantly, we now have a better understanding of the groups at risk.
> [Infection fatality rate] measuring 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at 25. However, the rate progressively increased with age, growing from 0.4% at 55 to around 15% at 85.
Age and certain comorbidities seem critical. This knowledge shapes the global COVID response, allowing help to be significantly more targeted and effective. For instance, when rolling out national vaccination plans.
___
¹ Whichever rate Trump was talking about – there's case fatality rate, crude fatality rate, infection fatality rate…
COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate is estimated at around 0.6% whereas H1N1/09 Flu infection fatality rate was estimated to be less than 0.03%. Not sure where you get “3x”, I think the correct number would be 20x based on these numbers.
* Covid-19 IFR source: https://www.cdc.gov/library/covid19/112420_covidupdate.html where a chart indicates an IFR between 0.5 and 0.75% for USA and England
* H1N1/09 IFR source: https://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b5213.full “We estimate that 0.026% (range 0.011-0.066%) of these individuals died from causes related to this infection”
But that's exactly the discussion I called out as not terribly relevant: The variance within Covid (due to age, location, comorbidities…) is much greater than variance between Covid and flu.
In other words, even a Covid-vs-flu rate difference of 20x (as you say) is dwarfed by the 1000x difference between Covid age groups (which you didn't contest). Can we agree on that?
My point is that a broadly aggregated statistics like "global IFR" is too crude to be actionable. Easy to put in a headline, sure, but more potential for confusion than good.
[1] https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
0.6% of the population in the USA, for instance, would mean about 2 million people would be killed by uncontrolled and massive COVID-19 spread.
Focusing down to small subgroups would only be relevant if you have a magic wand and could, for instance, seal off all over-60 year olds from human society for a year.
P.S. the paper you cited is by John Ioannidis. He has become notorious in 2020 attempting to prove Covid-19 isn’t very dangerous. Worth consideration as this version has managed to pass peer review, but keep in mind it’s outside the mainstream of opinion. IMO, the 0.2% estimate is pretty clearly low and I’ve read a good debunking of that specific paper in the past. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1316511734115385344.html
Technically yes, such average exists – the population is finite. But taking a population-wide decision based on such estimate is suboptimal. We already know a population parameter (age, comorbidities) that gets us an actionable segregation!
I personally see such "hiding behind an average of an exponential" as scientific fraud. Misinformed at best; disingenuous and murderous at worst (such as with Covid).
> He has become notorious in 2020
Interesting, thanks. I wasn't aware of John Ioannidis' pedigree. For those curious – this article does a good job summarizing the controversy (April 2020):
https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-...
> Focusing down to small subgroups would only be relevant if you have a magic wand and could, for instance, seal off all over-60 year olds from human society for a year.
A magic wand to seal off over-60 olds? How do you feel about sealing off everyone?
Worked great in New Zealand and Taiwan, and pretty dang good in Singapore, Australia, and even China. A pity we weren’t fast enough to do it here.
I haven’t seen any society successfully execute a strategy to exclude the aged from human society or viral transmission yet, and we’ve had 9 months to experiment. If such a strategy existed and was proven to work, your theory that it was idiotic to ignore it would make sense. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to exist.
Yet still we have people to this day repeating his knowingly and now admittedly false claims as though they are true. That's how deep the hook line and sinker got swallowed. It's fascinating psychology. Even when the con artist admits and explains the con, some people prefer to stay conned.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...
Suicides and homicides also up. Given that these deaths will occur for people with a typical age of 40, vs 80 for COVID, substantially more years of life have been lost from lockdown (which seems to have achieved little anyway), than from COVID.
That is the opioid crisis.
Source: The CDC WONDER database, group by year, and by "UCD - Drug/Alcohol Induced Case". (Deep link doesn't work)
Info on the vaccine https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/08/17/si...
They were using it in a limited way back in June https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma-asia/china-s-sinopharm-t...
and has recently got approval. I can't help but wonder if they'd offered it generally with a not fully tested warning when it was offered to "employees of some large state-run companies" presumably in April/May, how many lives would have been saved.
If she and the others involved in identifying the root cause and coming up with the vaccine, do not get the Nobel in Medicine/Chemistry i will consider the whole "Nobel Prize" system to be a complete tool and sham.
What was Obama given the Nobel Peace Prize for?
That said, AFAIK Obama himself found it somewhat cringeworthy when he was awarded the price, which - if it is true - makes it a lot less embarrassing on his part.
Also it seems they really haven't had reason to be happy with a couple of other candidates too, one leading a country that massacred Rohingas under her leadership and one starting another war in Africa.
Oslo, October 9, 2009"
They are different.
If you dilute a brand name with controversial actions or products, it drags the whole brand down. And it does not matter of parts of it are still good.
"Hakuin used to tell his pupils about an old woman who had a teashop, praising her understanding of Zen. The pupils refused to believe what he told them and would go to the teashop to find out for themselves.
Whenever the woman saw them coming she could tell at once whether they had come for tea or to look into her grasp of Zen. In the former case, she would server them graciously. In the latter, she would beckon to the pupils to come behind her screen. The instant they obeyed, she would strike them with a fire-poker.
Nine out of ten of them could not escape her beating."
If a big part of the nominations is obviously politically motivated, should the others get the tea or the poker?
https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-12-26/la-madre-de-la-vacuna-...
If not for that, it would indeed be decades-old egg on their face. I think they’ve done a fair job of freshening up that egg, though.
Not returning her to tenure track once her research proved fortuitous is much more concerning.
Trying to take credit now for facilitating her research when they actively worked against it at the time is damning.
> "We are grateful for Dr. Karikó's important contributions both during her time at Penn," said university spokesperson Maccarthy, "where she continues to hold an appointment as an adjunct associate professor." The school's promo video about mRNA technology focuses on Weissman, mentioning Karikó only in passing.
It should be pointed out that the university holds the patent for the vaccine:
> In 2005, Karikó and Weissman published their groundbreaking study. The University of Pennsylvania licensed the technology and patented it. (Researchers' patents are often held by the institutions where they work).
It seems unfair that UPenn gets the patent in spite of practically thwarting the research on the subject (cutting Dr. Karikó's salary).
Is innovation required to be only in safe and comfortable baby steps.. Or whatever can be controlled or understood..?
Maybe this is in part a reason why so many of our leaders, institutions and experts in so many fields revealed themselves not to be .. during COVID.
There are more voices starting to speak that the clock is starting to tick on some academic brands for failing to exist in the future, and the digital transformation of society has already left them behind.. While some remain at maintaining a present that is anchored in the past.
I'm passionate about the value of an education to improve your life and hope this rapidly improves with the the other rapid changes occurring during the pandemic.
Still, devaluing someone, marginalizing their contributions, and then continuing to own their intellectual property for the long game doesn't seem entirely reassuring behavior for any post secondary.
If it wasn't valuable then, why not let the prof walk with IP ownership if it's so worthless?
/S
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PS_CX0AAAAAJ&hl=en...
Privacy is the such a convenient and perfect excuse for institutions to cover up their mess.
It it seems pretty unfair to say that "the school wasn’t very supportive of the scientist who led the charge."
They gave her 6 years runway while she tried to find external funding and get the technology off the ground before kicking her off tenure, and kept her on payroll until the she made her breakthrough another 10 years later.
If I understand the timeline right, she started at Penn in 89, was kicked off tenure in 95, published her major mRNA paper in 2005, then left Penn to be a senior VP in 2013.
She was demoted precisely for doing what led to the techniques used by Biontech and Moderna.
For example, in this situation UPenn is not sharing the information out of "Privacy concerns". These could be alleviated by the scientist in question saying that they are free to share information about that time -- leaving no reason to continue hiding the information except for embarrassment.
Basically, it sounds like an institution at any time can announce "hey we did nothing wrong, and we would like to explain why, and have just asked the employee if they accept but they haven't responded yet" while the employee would need to confer with lawyers how to control what now becomes a public spectacle (along with its usual problems of libel, PR, fake news, etc.).
> the employee would need to confer with lawyers how to control what now becomes a public spectacle (along with its usual problems of libel, PR, fake news, etc.).
I don't think I even have a good armchair solution for this, let alone a real one.
--
I think in general it's a difference of where I would draw the line. This:
> Basically, it sounds like an institution at any time can announce "hey we did nothing wrong, and we would like to explain why, and have just asked the employee if they accept but they haven't responded yet"
seems like a feature to me, not a bug. If an employee is making accusations against a organization, than the organization should have a chance to clear their name.
---
However I don't have a good response to the issues of libel, PR, fake news, etc., except possibly to have a requirement that whatever is put out in the press release from the organization be approved by the ex-employee in question.
This guarantees that
A) The organization is not lying in a way that the employee is harmed by.
B) The employee is not lying in a way the organization is harmed by.
If it's impossible for the two to come to a conclusion, than either party can say something about it, or contest what the other says. This also allows the employee to say "I wanted to do a joint press release with $org, but we could not come to an agreement about what to release.", so at least the damage from this can be turned either direction.
Edit: Formatting
The situation without this rule, is that the university can and will release information that is in its interest and fail to release information that is not. This status quo is worse than what you are describing.
The point is that this biased information about a private individual shouldn't be public information. If the private individual is lying or misrepresenting the situation, then take it to court: don't use their private information against them for public spectacle.
Also unfortunately, it is very difficult to distinguish between one decades-long research path that will, eventually, yield significant results, and another one that will end in failure with nothing to show for it.
But that is the very nature of Research in basic hard sciences. We have to have systems in place which have such monetary/time losses factored in. The problem today is that Academia is using the same "short-term gains" yardstick used in the Industry which is completely wrong. The nature of the subject should dictate your manner of funding it.
Sure, everyone agrees with that. Can you propose a model that will work?
* Establish a network of "Research Universities" from each country in the World (sort of UN of Universities). The poorer countries can be partially funded by richer countries. This is to ensure that knowledge flows are not constrained due to lack of resources.
* Research in the various Sciences have to be clearly identified as "Critical" or Not. The former is funded and managed completely differently than the latter. For example, research in vaccines/cancer is considered critical while research in "battery chemistry"(currently a hot area of research) is not. In the former case, all we keep tabs on is "some progress" and not necessarily an external deadline i.e. researchers are given the freedom to keep working on it with self-imposed and self-defined milestones.
* All "money making" (eg. licenses/patents/royalties etc.) from Research is to be shared between Researchers, Institution and Industry (where applicable).
* All "Research" in Universities get funding from the following sources, some with constraints and some without;
----- 1) Govt. grant as part of yearly budget with no strings attached. This is taxpayer money and any output is available to the public.
----- 2) Academia/Industry tie-up (eg. VC/Angel money) where all stakeholders needs are considered. However if the research is considered "critical" Industry needs may be waived.
----- 3) "Corporate Social Responsibility"(CSR) money from all large corporations/rich folks etc.
----- 4) Revenue/Profit from University "businesses" like Education etc.
* Finally, No "Research" project should ever be overseen by purely "Administrative/Finance/MBA" types. Only Core Domain Experts should be granted oversight with the above mentioned helping as needed.
Agreed, a lot of grant funding now has an open access rider on it, so research doesn't get stuck behind a paywall.
> Research in the various Sciences have to be clearly identified as "Critical" or Not. The former is funded and managed completely differently than the latter.
How do you ensure that this classification of critical/non-critical happens accurately? How do you hire for this team, and what metrics would you use to judge their performance? How do you ensure that this 'non critical' funding isn't simply a waste of money? This solution seems to just push the same problem further down the road.
>For example, research in vaccines/cancer is considered critical while research in "battery chemistry"(currently a hot area of research) is not.
I work in vaccines, and I don't agree with this blanket assertion. How do you deal with vaccine technology that is junk and will never produce a safe and efficacious product?
>In the former case, all we keep tabs on is "some progress" and not necessarily an external deadline i.e. researchers are given the freedom to keep working on it with self-imposed and self-defined milestones.
So unlimited funding for unlimited projects as long as they are critical according to some review committee? We might have a tiny problem doing that.. :)
>* Finally, No "Research" project should ever be overseen by purely "Administrative/Finance/MBA" types. Only Core Domain Experts should be granted oversight with the above mentioned helping as needed.
We should have a large tent. Financial management is a critical component of any successful project. "Core Domain Experts" will likely have limited time, given their other commitments and own personal research to work on. Also, there needs to be a thorough vetting and oversight to make sure that these experts aren't just funding projects that their buddies are working on.
I think you have some good ideas, but as you can probably imagine too, its no easy task proposing a working model, and getting it adopted world-wide :)
>How do you ensure that this classification of critical/non-critical happens accurately?
Define "accurately". We are playing the balance of probability based on the "domain experts" knowledge base. In some cases it would be obvious. For example take this mRNA research; this great article from https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-... states;
In the natural world, the body relies on millions of tiny proteins to keep itself alive and healthy, and it uses mRNA to tell cells which proteins to make. If you could design your own mRNA, you could, in theory, hijack that process and create any protein you might desire — antibodies to vaccinate against infection, enzymes to reverse a rare disease, or growth agents to mend damaged heart tissue.
>How do you ensure that this 'non critical' funding isn't simply a waste of money? ... How do you deal with vaccine technology that is junk and will never produce a safe and efficacious product?
This is where the system has to absorb the losses when you do decide to cut the chord but this should not be based on imaginary "market/financial needs". Revenue generation from various sources somewhat guarantees that.
>So unlimited funding for unlimited projects as long as they are critical according to some review committee? We might have a tiny problem doing that.. :)
Of course, this is nothing new; we are dealing with Humans after all. Just make your criteria for "critical" very stringent and the people in charge knowledgeable. This is how Science has always worked when the "bean counters" don't get involved.
Think of it this way; in any project there is always the core/essence/kernel Science/Technology/Whatever which is the primary reason for its existence while the others are ancillary which exist only to support the primary. If you make the mistake of taking the ancillary for the primary, you will lose almost always (i put "almost" to factor in the role of Chance :-).
* Fundamental groundbreaking science research is done in research institutes without pressure to teach or get industry grants, with 100% state funding - the Max Planck institutes
* Industry-relevant research runs in entirely separate teams, either in applied-science institutes - the Fraunhofer Institutes - or universities, with mixed public and private grant funding
Presto, no more pressure for industry sponsors of blue-sky fundamental research.
[1]
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-...
WSJ also has a number of good articles:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-pfizer-delivered-a-covid-va...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-couples-quest-to-cure-can...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-pfizer-partner-biontech-bec...
What I found quite interesting was the latest news release from BioNtech where they thank all their partners. Some parts of the supply chain are only served by very small companies.
https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
Thanks for the link.
PS: The WSJ articles are all behind a paywall and hence inaccessible.
"Researchers’ patents are often held by the institutions where they work."
I wonder what the law is around that ... what percentage are the discoverers legally entitled to?
If the answer is obscene, what efforts have been made to fix that?
At University of Washington one of the standard deals is 27% for the inventors (for patent license revenue). Of course every deal is negotiable. When you use university resources such as lab space and students the university will take some financial share.
When it comes to equity stake in a startup the deal negotiated becomes much more tricky of course and the university may maintain an equity stake in the company in exchange for exclusive licensing of the patents.
https://comotion.uw.edu/what-we-do/startup-related-services/...
http://www.washington.edu/admin/rules/policies/APS/59.04.htm...
Thanks for posting the link.
He ended up giving himself an Ulcer to show he could cure it.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...
Okay...?
If this still bothers you, please tell me what kind of organization would exist to support 25 years of false starts, and what needs to change to make that kind of organization exist.
I think this is a major problem in our society. We expect immediate profits off of research, but that limits us to research that is less bold and innovative. We should allow our brilliant scientists to follow their passions instead of following grants.
Regardless, back to my question, what needs to change to support all the other researchers toiling away right now that won't gain any consensus or utility till the year 2050.
Realistically, the funding would probably need to come (and already does come) from the government. The government should be funding manned missions to Mars and investing much more in longshot technologies like nuclear fusion, to name a couple obvious ones.
Our society has plenty of money to support people like her and her research. That's the point of the academy in the traditional sense: not a vocational school, but a gateway to new understandings of the world.
This means you will abandon some projects that would ultimately have been very successful. That's true for every possible strategy.
Stop modelling universities, national education and research systems on profit-seeking businesses.
Businesses already cover that niche; it's entirely unhelpful for universities to exist with a profit-making premise.
A Federal Universal Basic Income along with a Single Payer Healthcare system would go a long way to supporting 25 years of false starts for projects where the primary initial investment is intellectual labor. Many science, engineering, and cultural projects fit this description.
UBI is a fantasy for children.
While I do believe there needs to be a first world floor to living conditions, I've come to more understand UBI as one more way of killing the middle class. It's the Supply side, a lack of competition, that is out of whack for many of the most expensive things in the US, and probably most other industrialized nations.
UBI increases how much the poorest can pay, it does nothing to limit how much can be demanded by the rent-seeking rich. In effect UBI is a subsidy to the rich and an attack on the middle class.
If there aren't enough doctors as a whole, that's a sign that either the incentives and detriments offered by society are incorrect or that barriers to entry are too high for the market to function. (In the case of medical professionals in the US I've heard that a combination of artificial scarcity and malpractice worries are the issue. For the latter I'd like to see criminal (reckless endangerment, etc), rather than economic, outcomes for egregious cases; which should also apply to institutions training and certifying doctors. With that layer of protection the 'insurance' against being harmed should instead be covered by normal disability programs at the society level.
In the case of insufficient doctors in an area, that sounds like a great place for the military to have a base and provide civilization; though the doctors (and possibly other professionals) not existing there might also be a sign of larger issues.
If a place isn't economically viable anymore it is important to identify the root cause and fix it, or offer assistance to relocate to places that are useful for their residents and society.
Having those is pretty orthogonal to actually getting results in science. No need to mix them in.
Universities should actually fund (so indirectly by the goverment from taxes) long term research. That’s kinda the whole point of Universities, in addition to education. Long term research that doesn’t have immediate short them commercial interest. Not make the scientists be basically startup founders that must constantly pitch to get money.
And the reason we want to support that is because on long term there often is very useful commercial benefits that then improve everyones lives.
Academic research is supposed to be for such long-term research. Plenty of scientists research for entire life, just to explore dead ends.
Also, WTF it is considered as OK to base scientific research decisions on profit generated within 5 years? (I know how it happens and why, but considering it as OK is ridiculous)
This is basically the whole point of academia.
Government, academia, VCs in industries with slower payoffs than software (i.e., most, including biotech).
OTOH, deciding which series of decades of false starts are worth continuing to support and which to cut off is...well, not an exact science would be an epic understatement.
Now that mRNA is proven technology, it can bring all other gene technologies up with it.
False supposition, in most cases in my reading it is called Pfizer/BioNTech in reference
> After six years, her bosses at Penn were reportedly so frustrated by the lack of momentum that they cut her salary and demoted her.
Actually, she was denied tenure. At most universities, going up for tenure after 6 years is just part of the process, and it's fairly common for people to be denied. It's not like they singled her out.
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.
Not even VCs have a great track record at picking winners, and they do this for a living.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!