Dr. Katalin Karikó (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Dr. Katalin Karikó (2021)

glamour.com

85 pointsfsndz18 comments

> Except the research was published and almost no one paid attention. No fanfare. Stop me if this sounds familiar: No funding.

It’s interesting to me that for-profit startups are taking chances on research that academics aren’t. Academics is supposed to be the place for charting unknown territory and taking unprofitable risks. Yet it seems like such stories are becoming more common, and this might be closely related to the reproducibility crisis in science too; the notion that we need to gatekeep funding for positive results may be slowing down progress. The tenacity of Karikó sounds amazing and beyond what most people are capable of, but it just makes me wonder how many would-be researchers and breakthrough ideas are being discarded because academics has become so self-protective and risk averse. Or is the system working well and as intended, and we just need to expect a few brilliant thinkers to be left behind every now and then?

I'm not surprised at all. First, the failure rate of new bio ideas is extremely high. Second, even when they work the development time is extremely long. As methods advance, there are chances to make time-to-derisk shorter and cheaper, but right now you need extremely patient capital with very long risk timelines. And the high failure rate means you need to place a massive number of bets, and each of those failed bets doesn't have the capital recovery mode of being an aquihire.

The norm throughout history is for brilliant thinkers to be left behind and ignored and for their ideas to go nowhere. I would say we are living in a time when a greater number of great thinkers have a chance of impacting the world than ever before. Though I wouldn't know how to asses the fraction of great thinkers that get a chance to execute.

It is always great to remember the giants on whose shoulders we stand [1].

Specially, Cesar Milstein (Argentinian Nobel Prize) was against patenting the discovery [2] for a trillion size industry.

[1] https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...

[2] https://www.whatisbiotechnology.org/index.php/exhibitions/mi...

I sometimes think that it's better to take a patent when you undeniably can, and then release the patented tech under a permissive license. At least, this way an unrelated but shrewd party won't have a chance to acquire a patent, and milk / troll everyone.

I agree with your argument but take into account that this is what we are discovering just now because of the software and hardware industries and Milstein was a pioneer in "open sourcing" his work with an "open license".

> The focus, he said, would be on how he’d missed it…

I’m glad they included this. It casts the former lab director in a good light. Of course I have no idea how he previously treated her.

I find the opposite is more typical: not acknowledging one’s own failures.

Also (related to a story a couple of days ago) don’t normally like these kids of bio stories but I liked this one.

This reminded me of the story of the VC who tried to avoid meeting Larry & Sergey when they were looking for investment:

> David Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine.” Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”

https://www.bvp.com/anti-portfolio

Article is 2021

I was confused by the immediacy in some of the commentary in the story. But the article was (almost) three years ago.

mRNA vaccines feel like they're going to be absolutely game changing in the next few decades, and maybe one day we'll see HIV, Malaria and many cancers as forgotten memories the same way we look at Polio today. Even with covid-19, traditional vaccines didn't have the same level of effectiveness and a lot more of the world would have been severely impacted without them.

> same way we look at Polio today

You mean "still present and due to the nature of the vaccines requiring eternal vigilance"?

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