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Lots of cool transplant news this week
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Can you just publish papers with fake methods and get them peer reviewed and published in journals without any hope of making them work?
Yes of course.
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Good underdog story. I know this isn’t unique to academia but ugh.
https://x.com/florianederer/status/1708829133705302180?s=20
“Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman are brilliant researchers who represent the epitome of scientific inspiration and determination.” --Penn President Liz Magill
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This is why I always advise my students to try as much as possible to secure their first Nobel before tenure review. Huge help.
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I thought this person was trolling but a bunch of people took him seriously so 
.
Only the women. Men can have tenure if you like the cut of their jib. Women can have tenure if they achieve 8000% more than they’re male counterparts and they’re not too shrill.
I’ve heard many stories along these lines. They don’t usually have happy endings. From the Wired article:
With an mRNA boom taking place on the other side of the Atlantic, Karikó decided it was time to leave Hungary and head for the US. So in 1985, she accepted a job at Temple University and moved to Philadelphia along with her husband, two year old daughter, and a teddy bear with £900 sewn into it – the proceeds from the sale of their car on the black market.
Beats the hell out of Ted Cruz’ dad sewing $100 into his underwear imo.
It did not take long for the American dream to sour. After four years, she was forced to leave Temple University for neighbouring UPenn after a dispute with her boss, who then attempted to have her deported.
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Karikó has been at the helm of BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine development. In 2013, she accepted an offer to become Senior Vice President at BioNTech after UPenn refused to reinstate her to the faculty position she had been demoted from in 1995. “They told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality,” she said. ”When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.’”
BioNTech now funds some of this research at Penn.
She seemed pretty fine with everything that happened. Said it allowed her to be a bench scientist into her 50s, which she liked a lot more than management and grant applications.
Yeah, I heard an interview where the phone woke her up this morning. She’s a make lemons lemonade kind of person. Not nearly as vindictive as those people deserve.
Her daughter is an Olympic gold medalist. Determination seems to run in the family. Smarts is important in science but indomitable persistence is probably a better predictor of outcomes.
Smart and persistent is good but the most likely outcome is still getting ground into dust.
Life is like a poker tournament. Expect outcomes to reflect player abilities, but with massive variance.
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Associating with any of these fucksticks is a massive fail though. And going along with it just means they’ll keep doing it.