This article makes me wonder how many groundbreaking discoveries are buried under academia's bureaucracy and ego battles.
The formula was sold to a big pharma company that completely botched the third round trial. It's not that harmful side effects were discovered, but due to a bad testing methodology, the results were not nearly as good as they were. The big pharma company recognized the issue, but a revised third round trial would delay the introduction by years, at which time the amount of profits to make from the medicine were considered too low due to patent expiration. So they just dropped it altogether.
It would be too uneconomical for a new company to kickstart the whole approval process again: as soon as the patents expire, other companies would immediately release their generic variant.
End result: millions of potential carriers of the disease won't see the benefit of a medicine that has been shown to work.
Whereas the issue here is that against any reasonable objective of publicly research, academia has institutionalised a series of dysfunctional incentives.
ie., the "Accident" is the norm
This is a case where a non-profit would be useful.
Good people do exist in academia, but most of them have retired, and the rest put up with it. I have a general belief that, unlike the majority of careers, being a successful academic (and I can't underscore "academic" enough) requires a strong moral compass, historically oriented toward a "Divine Light of Truth" or God, which ever floats your boat. Such is not required in a grant-seeking paradigm.
The prof said, "that depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing'. "
So there you have your reason: anyone whose livelihood depends solely on the good opinion of others is likely to have low moral standards.
Highly insightful.
If a person is unhappy about the bureaucracy of the large org they can find another job in a startup. Or they can find a better job in a smaller, better managed organization. Or if they’re feeling lucky, they can even start their own business.
If they currently hold a senior position in FAANG working on innovative ways to sell more ads, that step will likely involve a substantial pay cut. Still, IMO brilliant engineers are relatively well-compensated across the whole industry. The work they do normally generates a lot of value for the employer.
They should be generally fine financially even without these millions of stock options. And they will be probably happier working on the innovations which do something good, as opposed to inventing models, methods, and apparatuses to advance the ongoing enshittification of the internet.
The only fundamental difference is not between science and engineering, but between research&academia and industry, specifically in the number of positions available and the competition there is to fill them.
You mentioned startups. Basically that means create your own position. That's way out of reach to any academic position because no one can simply go out and create their own research institutions. Therefore, if you want to make a living or have a career in academia, you have to subject yourself to their rules and processes.
Perhaps only software in the US. I'm not sure your brilliant mechanical or civil or electronics engineer gets fairly compensated for their value, and even great software engineers can get poorly paid in many countries.
That should create an arbitrage opportunity.
Not really. Outside of programming in major hub cities, everyone else is faced with limited opportunities and a lack of a competitive job market. I started in 2000 at an internationally known company with a fixed scale for junior engineers of $50K for a BS and $55K for a MS. That was by no means extravagant for the time, when SV was throwing $100K offers at CS majors to do web dev. Roll $55K forward to today and that's $98K. I look at the job listings for juniors in my field and nobody is offering that. I see listings for experienced senior positions below that level.
Programming computers is unusual in that it has extremely low operational overhead. Every other engineering discipline has to expend capital and extra resources to generate the final work product and that puts a limit on how much of the pie the engineers can take. With that said, there is a definite long term salary deflation that has been impacting everyone outside of software development.
What the bean-counter class can't seem to understand is that researchers are motivated to make big discoveries, so you can actually trust them to be judicious in their use of resources.
What you don't seem to understand is there are some who are not motivated by that.
Note that I make no claims as to how many are honest/dishonest. This is a valid thing that "bean counters" often miss.
Yes, and the classical solution was to deny those people tenure. The system worked pretty well, for a large institutional system, until roughly the early 90's.
What we have now is an impossibly high standard that prevents well-motivated researchers from accomplishing the very goals that the institution is meant to serve.
Edit: now do me a favor and analyze whether university administrators have a track-record of using funds with prudence.
Essentially we have created huge administrative bodies to check that nobody is taking advantage of the system, without any cost benefit analysis. We often now spend similar amounts on checking as we are on running the system itself. Maybe we should just acknowledge that some people will always take advantage of the system, and that's just the cost of "doing business".
But in case it needs to be said, yeah, we should probably maintain some reasonably-effective process for weeding out unproductive researchers. Again, we had one that wasn't too bad long before the bean-counters ruined research.
Unfortunately they've hyper-formalized in an utterly homogenous way. It's such a disaster that perhaps a nepotism free for all wouldn't be quite so bad. But I do think there's a deeper discussion here about how academic research can scale in a better way, both to accomplish larger/more expensive projects and to handle increased application pool sizes.
Slack is important. Slack is necessary for things to move at all.
(Which is not to say that the systems I'm looking at today have anywhere near the right amount of slack. Almost all lobbying should be explicitly illegal IMO. Campaign funding should be heavily regulated and enforced. Universities should be regulated so as to prevent the profit-driven hellscape they have become, at least as long as they're going to be directly or indirectly receiving tax money. Pharmaceutical companies, congresscritters, law enforcement, the prison industrial complex, ... it's a total mess. And it's not just about using the regulatory hammer, it's about underlying incentives. Everything has been captured and monetized. It's gotten so bad that I feel like it would be only fair if I were to be paid for my vote, since it feels like it's going to be converted vote -> influence -> money ever more efficiently anyway. That's not the system I want.)
A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better, and (3) universities explicitly select for doctoral students interested in an academic career. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some.
However, this approach should, in the long run, create a positive outlook for doctoral students, ensure that the average quality of doctoral students is higher, and reduce the amount of doctoral "slave labor" which is heavily exploited to support the grant-seeking paradigm (not exaggerating; I know a doctoral student who was required to be in the lab whenever the PI was, which was often 10 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week).
A few more ideas which come to mind right now include:
- Stop treating the grant-seeking people as members of the faculty. If a professor is interested in doing academic research, the department funds a maximum of two doctoral students (something done at IIT Bombay, to my knowledge, though the exact quantity may vary). Hire grant-seeking researchers exclusively in a university-affiliated "research institute", physically and departmentally removed from the faculty. Don't call them professors; call them researchers.
- Make faculty prioritize. I know multiple computer science faculty who are tenured professors at a major institution but are actually working full-time for tech companies, yet they weren't on sabbatical. At least one of these professors moved across the country to the Bay Area, was (to my knowledge) relived of their teaching duties, and still tried to advise doctoral students. This practice should not be allowed. Free up the salary for faculty who care about the core mission of the university: education.
- Develop an intensive doctoral curriculum tightly focused on performing academic research. To my knowledge, the acquisition of academic research skills is arcane. Certainly the academic advisor should pass these skills to their student, but it seems that too many faculty are wrapped up in grant-seeking behaviors to show them. Doctoral students need to be explicitly taught the necessary skills to be a successful professor, which can only happen when the vast majority of doctoral students are attempting to perform academic research and not grant-seeking research.
- Create a researcher pathway in the "research institute." If a student applies for the doctoral program but doesn't wish to perform academic research in their career, offer them a junior researcher position in the research institute with opportunities to advance as a researcher, which is honestly what some students who get their doctoral degree actually want. If one was to award a terminal degree to the researcher, it would not be a PhD.
I am an eternal optimist on these topics. I strongly believe that universities can still thrive, but they need to adapt by making hard administrative delineations and creating alternative paths for entrants.
If the NIH gave some grants like they already do, some grants that would target someone like Karikó, some grants that would target reproducibility experts, etc. (in addition to some that may be a combination of such criteria) it would be a much more complicated political game to try to be an ideal imposter. You'd still have some but I think there would be many more filtered out, and more true positives kept.
There is no Nobel for people that run labs that produce the next 10 Nobel winners other than themselves.
I'd link to articles about it but right now searching for anything having to do with Texas, coronavirus, and vaccine, is buried in articles about Texas vaccine politics.
But you're right — Karikó's story is textbook, prototypical, and its strength is its greatest weakness, that it's almost abnormally illuminated. We never know about all the other stories out there that aren't lucky enough to be exposed so clearly.
Having always a suitable opportunity for someone's skillset is impossible.
I don't think this problem is exclusive of academia. Anyone in the job market has war stories about ridiculous hiring processes that reject candidates for the most pathetic reasons.