> A couple of years after her embarrassing demotion, she ran into immunologist Drew Weissman at the office copy machine and struck up a conversation about mRNA. Weissman was intrigued, and asked Karikó to come work in his lab.
The government funding doesn't necessarily have to identify the Karikó's of the world, as long as it can identify the Weissman's of the world who can identify The Karikó at the ad-hoc meeting.
This is one of the areas where "fund people not objects" really works. The people that are really productive are the first to know that they are heavily dependent on having a good team, and often those people are really good at finding hidden talent.
The problem, though, is then often people like Weissman get the credit, because they're the ones with the money, and the Karikós are dismissed as "just implementing Weissman's ideas" or something like that, even when a lot of the time the Weissmans of the world aren't developing teams, they're attaching themselves to them. It's this sort of self-fulfilling prophesy: so-and-so has good connections -> goes somewhere with lots of resources and good fit for them -> does well -> people attribute success to them -> fund "the person" -> cycle continues; meanwhile someone else has poor connections -> can't get an "in" -> is dismissed -> struggles to do well -> isn't funded -> etc.
Karikó, for example, at her stage couldn't develop or attract a team if she wanted to.
I don't know Weissman so none of this is to comment on him. But I personally know many examples of this phenomenon (and have seen the Wizard behind the curtain when random events cause these cycles to get disrupted). It's that I think part of the problem the article is referring to is this kind of vicious circle and self-perpetuating funding and career cycles in certain areas of academic science.
I'm all for funding people rather than projects; I just think that it's only a fraction of the problem with research funding today.
The government funding doesn't necessarily have to identify the Karikó's of the world, as long as it can identify the Weissman's of the world who can identify The Karikó at the ad-hoc meeting.
This is one of the areas where "fund people not objects" really works. The people that are really productive are the first to know that they are heavily dependent on having a good team, and often those people are really good at finding hidden talent.