mic drop

[hitchhiker]

In 2013—after enduring multiple professional setbacks, one denied grant after another, and a demotion at the institution to which she’d been devoted for decades—Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., walked out of her lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine for the last time.
...
That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”

https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-of-year-2021

Comments

[freyjaw]

Thanks for posting this! Because of her, I've never had COVID-19, nor has anyone else in the family. We've all been vaccinated.

[minoanmiss]

WOOT

[amaebi]

I admire her persistence. I'm so sorry it was called for. I wish I didn't feel that lots of folks believe that her Nobel somehow makes up for all that, all those starved and oppressive years. I point out that timelines can make a big difference in assessing success, failure, or trend.

And I wonder whether people still blithely claim that "markets" (more often organizations like universities or firms) are really really good at selecting for "quality." I haven't heard so much of it over the past decade or so, but that's also related to whom I encounter.

[hitchhiker]

yeah, same. it's shameful how she was treated, and almost a guarantee that a lot of similar academics who don't toe the party line live their lives in precarity and pass unnoticed.

[amaebi]

https://twitter.com/paulnovosad/status/1460373269262090243

[hitchhiker]

holy shit, a real life evil scientist!

[psi_star_psi]

Bummer that he's dead, so he can't see that his being a scumbag is more of his Wikipedia page than anything constructive he accomplished.

[hitchhiker]

haha, yeah! poetic justice