After Shunning Scientist, University of Pennsylvania Celebrates Her Nobel Prize | Hacker News Reader

After Shunning Scientist, University of Pennsylvania Celebrates Her Nobel Prize

wsj.com

24 pointsgnicholas14 comments

> Today, Karikó is an adjunct professor in the school’s department of Neurosurgery.

Is this the first time a Nobel Prize has been awarded to an adjunct professor?

You may need to be more specific than that.

Svante Paabo, director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, won the Nobel Prize last year. He's also an adjunct professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. But I don't think that's what you mean.

Louise Glück was an adjunct professor in the Yale English Department when she was awarded her Nobel Prize. https://news.yale.edu/2020/10/08/louise-gluck-awarded-2020-n...

Donna Strickland won the Physics prize for the first paper she published as a grad student. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0030401885...)

She was an associate professor when she got it, because she'd never bothered to apply for full professor.

(I remember one of my CS professors proudly declaring he'd become a full professor in class once; I looked him up recently and he'd moved to be a director at Google Cloud, so I guess it's not that great in the end.)

My understanding is that the pay bump from associate to full is quite modest at many institutions. And since tenure is typically granted with the promotion to associate, people care comparatively much less about promotion to full.

They might even care negatively, since AIUI being a full professor opens up new "opportunities" to get stuck doing administrative work.

Associate ≠ adjunct. Associate means that the person is one of the junior faculty, adjunct (typically) means the person is someone who might teach a class or supervise graduate students. But an adjunct doesn't have a vote in faculty meetings.

Jeffrey Hall was essentially forced into early retirement due to lack of funding before he won nobel prize. He’s still retired I think, never went back into science.

This is really upsetting as a portrait of what's wrong with academia

I'm not sure, this article actually does a good job of presenting both sides of the story, a couple of excerpts:

> she saw that cells two colleagues had worked on for weeks had degraded and were no longer viable and discarded them without asking for permission, startling her colleagues. “This is trash,” Karikó told them.

> while chatting with colleagues at a department Christmas party, a professor mentioned that Karikó was working for him on a project. “You think I’m working for you?” Karikó asked him, livid, according to someone who witnessed the episode. “I’m here to advance science, I’m never, ever, working for you.”

She would not be the first academic to be a bit prickly.

There are certainly other situations where fantastic researchers were mistreated by their institutions until the breakthroughs become too significant, famous, and/or lucrative to ignore.

more so that an underpaid, advanced researcher is more susceptible to manipulation

This WSJ article is paywalled. Even if I can resort to hoping that the Internet Archive continues to be allowed to make such content available it is probably not a great idea to promote such walled-garden links.

There is a very good SciAm article explaining Karikó and Weissman's work at the time of their Breakthrough Prize announcement: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-mrna-pioneer-d...

https://archive.ph/hWXMz

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