In Breaking Through (Bodley Head 2024), Katalin Karikó tells a remarkable story of hard work, low pay, breakthrough ideas — and later a Nobel Prize (with Drew Weissman). That story is sharpened by her mistreatment by the University of Pennsylvania.

Karikó grew up in Hungary but moved to the U.S. after receiving her PhD. She worked for years as a low-paid researcher, mostly at the University of Pennsylvania, where she never obtained a tenure track position, much less tenure.

There are many fascinating aspects to her story but I want to focus on one in particular: the way that it highlights the importance of ideas. That element is often neglected in the race to publish (or perish), obtain funding, and schmooze with powerful people.

“Dollars per net square footage”

Karikó’s book focuses on her scientific experiments, their achievements, and the ideas behind them, even while the University of Pennsylvania focused on “dollars per net square footage of lab space.” You read that correctly. Throughout Kariko’s decades long career at Penn, mostly as a low paid researcher without any staff or post docs, this is what her superiors focused on.

One superior told her many times about the importance of dollars per net square footage: “The university doesn’t just look at departments. They go through this stuff at an individual-investigator level. Perhaps if you were a lead author in publications like Nature, I could make a better case on your behalf. But you’re not publishing in Nature, and you also don’t get grants. So unless something changes, this isn’t going to go well.”

The University of Pennsylvania, like too many organizations, uses metrics which are often meaningless to divvy up resources. For universities, the metrics are usually publications, citations, and funding. (For more on that point, I recommend the book The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton University Press 2018) by historian Jerry Muller).

In fact, Karikó didn’t publish much. Her Nobel Prize was mostly based on a paper published in 2005 in Immunity. Before being accepted by Immunity, it had been rejected by Nature within 24 hours of submission because, according to Nature, it was an “incremental” contribution,

Her co-author Drew Weissman, who was a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania, thought their phones would be ringing off the hooks from calls about the Immunity paper. But there was nothing, not even funding, and few citations. In retrospect, this was a turning point in Karikó’s life. Academic doors closed for about 15 years until she was awarded the Nobel Prize with Weissman.

The great contradiction of science

Her story highlights a big problem with universities: ideas matter less than sheer numbers. Publishing many papers requires a researcher to publish in an area where many papers are already being published. That strategy ensures that there are researchers who will accept and cite your papers and give your grant proposals good evaluations. It is the great contradiction of science: the university research system claims it wants something new. But something new means that there won’t be enough other researchers to read and cite the papers, or evaluate the grant proposals. In those proposals, a researcher is expected to describe in detail what will be done and achieved, which means that the researcher must already have done it.

Back to the 2005 Immunity paper. Millions of scientific papers are published each year and researchers know that they must focus on areas where the funding, papers, and citations are. So they are unlikely to read what probably appeared to be a random paper in a sea of millions at the time.

Karikó’s career was saved by startups such as Moderna and BioNTech; she went to work for the latter in 2013. And second, by the coronavirus. A vaccine had to be developed quickly and an mRNA-based vaccine was easier to develop than one using traditional methods. And, as it happened, Karikó had done the most important work in mRNA.

A small disappointment

My biggest disappointment with the book is that she doesn’t refer to similar cases—of which there are likely many — or to what other Nobel Laureates are saying. Some of them are saying similar things. For example, a biochemist, molecular biologist, and a physicist claim they could not get funding for their research, given today’s emphasis on less risky projects; the physicist claims he could not even get a job today. Another scientist (turned policy maker) argues that in today’s climate every project must succeed and thus people study only marginal, incremental topics where the path forward is clear, and you can virtually guarantee a positive result.

Nobel Laureates in physics, chemistry, and medicine also criticize the emphasis on metrics that the University of Pennsylvania used to demote Karikó. Metrics have mostly evolved into a numbers game, for instance with impact factors. One says: “most impact factors are measures of yearly average number of citations for papers published in previous two-year period, yet truly good papers often take many years to be cited, far too long to be reflected in impact factor.” Another argues institutions should judge scientists based on intimate knowledge of their research, and not rely on journals in which they have been published.

One scientist argues in a Nature op-ed that scientists must publish less; otherwise, good research will be swamped by the ever-increasing volume of poor work. One study found that a glut of papers impedes the rise of new ideas.

A first-mover game?

There is some evidence that the numbers game is basically a first-mover game. For instance, a study published in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences found that recent recipients of PhDs who scored just above or below a cutoff for grant proposals fared very differently in future grants. Those who scored just above the cutoff subsequently received twice as much funding as the second group. Yet their initial grant proposals scored almost the same. Metrics such as funding per square foot have the same effect. They reward those who initially received funding, thus reducing the importance of subsequent work, including the ideas from that work.

I hope that someone will look more closely at these types of stories. It is ironic that the University of Pennsylvania has top-ranked economics and innovation departments, yet does not seem to have pursued the implications of Katalin Karikó for America’s basic research system. As universities struggle with funding cuts from the Trump administration, it might be wise for them to look more closely at how university science has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, and how it might be done better.