[HN Gopher] Dr. Katalin Kariko (2021)
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Dr. Katalin Kariko (2021)
Author : fsndz
Score : 76 points
Date : 2024-03-31 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.glamour.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.glamour.com)
| harsh183 wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| > 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.
| sukruh wrote:
| 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
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| 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...
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| 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".
| dahart wrote:
| > 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 Kariko 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?
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
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