How academia shunned the science behind the Covid vaccine

It seems the message of the story is quite simple: When universities try to force you into adjunct status because you are not bringing in enough money, leave, because you have an almost 100% certainty that you can do better elsewhere. And that is what she did.

In part, this situation is due to the novelty of the work. I recall the frustration of a colleague whose grant applications were repeatedly rejected. He had to wait 10 years for the discipline to catch-up to get funding. It is an example of the Semilwiess reflex.

There is a lot of gatekeeping in publishing and grant funding. The system should be much more transparent and dynamic. Better to have discarded ideas then not knowing about them.

I see this so much when I am reviewing - so much innovation stifled, while mainstream funding is circulated around amongst a relatively small group of familiar academics working on reiterations of what is basically the same project at source, often based on 50-year-old theories. Occasionally it's possible for academics to break through, but not often. Some leave, some retire, but overall the loss to society is great.

I don't really concur with the message of this article for a number of reasons. It's not like the potential, therapeutic benefit of mRNA-based products has never been recognised - they have been appreciated since the first inception of "gene-therapy" (the idea of introducing nucleic acid material into patients for therapeutic benefit). However, the early years of gene-therapy were somewhat of a minefield and many assumed that development programs were just too risky to pursue. One of the major reasons for this is the process required to actually deliver nucleic acid material into the cells of a patient - you need a vector. Vectors can be either viral-based (like the AstraZeneca vaccine) or synthetic (often made of lipid molecules like that of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine). The point being that it has taken a very, very long time for these technologies to become safe, efficient, and, more importantly - consistent in their manufacture. So, I would argue that whilst I don't know the full circumstances surrounding the lack of interest in Kariko's work, it is undoubtedly associated with the early skepticism towards using ANY form of nucleic acid based therapies (because of the early issues with the vector technologies) during the 90s and early 00s. She was probably not the only one to be shunned!

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it’s original, you’ll have to ram it down their throats. - Howard Aiken (1900 – 1973) Science advances through funerals - Max Planck (1858 – 1947) ... and don't forget that Einstein had to develop his General Relativity as an employee of the Swiss patent office.