Lessons hidden in Nobel laureate’s career

By Panduka Karunanayake

 This year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA technology that combined Biochemistry and Immunology. Their work formed the foundation for the mRNA vaccines that helped control the COVID-19 pandemic and probably saved millions of lives. It also has the potential to contribute towards applications in stem cell research and gene therapy, which may lead to treatment options for lethal diseases that currently have few or none.

Their work is an excellent example of scientific research that pursues unusual or unorthodox lines of inquiry that eventually leads to a major breakthrough and beneficial applications. Such research requires long periods of gestation and carries a high risk of ‘drawing a blank’. But it forms the basis for major advances in science and knowledge. Success stories like this help to highlight an important aspect about knowledge: a knowledge that is considered ‘useless’ today may turn out to be lifesaving tomorrow. To put it the other way around: all knowledge has value. To limit the pursuit of knowledge to only those aspects that are considered ‘useful’ at present is to limit the realisation of the full potential of the human mind.

However, scientists who pursue such unorthodox lines of inquiry face enormous challenges. More often than not, their efforts don’t yield positive results or their careers are cut short or diverted to other lines of inquiry. As a result, humanity may lose many valuable ideas, forever. If we truly value their originality, commitment and effort, the wider society must put in place mechanisms that protect their careers and provide them with facilities. One of the most important places where this happens is academia – universities are naturally thought of as spaces that provide academic freedom and career stability through the guarantee of employment (this is called ‘tenure’ in the West or ‘confirmation’ in Sri Lanka).

Kariko’s career

In this context, the remarkable career of 68-year-old Hungarian-born biochemist Katalin Kariko has important lessons.After Kariko’s lab in Hungary lost funding in 1985, she and her young family migrated to the US. Her work thereafter pursued unusual directions – a propensity she appears to have shown through her career.

While she was working on mRNA-based gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, the field of mRNA as a whole fell out of favour in the scientific community. She found it increasingly difficult to find research grants for her work. The result was that her own career progress suffered, because she was unable to become promoted to a full professor, and what is worse, after repeated grant rejections, the University actually demoted her in 1995. Can you believe it? A future Nobel laureate was not merely not promoted but was actually demoted by her university – not because her work was below par but because it could not attract research grants, and not because it wasn’t scientifically sound but because it wasn’t mainstream enough!

 The pivotal 1990s

This was not an isolated incident taking place in a vacuum. The 1990s was a time when sweeping changes were taking place throughout the world and in academia. In the world, the failed experiment of the Soviet bloc fell like dominos and the world became unipolar, driven by neoliberal economics emerging from Washington. The dictates of the World Bank came to dominate all walks of life – including the scientific enterprise, which was ‘handed over’ to the corporate industry.

Judging the ‘value’ of a project shifted from focusing on its inherent value to anticipating its outcome. Naturally, the outcomes that mattered were the short-term, measurable outcomes, especially those that produced profits. Scientific research had to pass the test of ‘utility’ to get financial support. Unorthodox lines of inquiry would not fit the bill – so if states did not support them, nobody would. The fate that befell Kariko’s work was not unusual for such lines of inquiry, and it is even more pronounced today.

But what is even sadder is that it wasn’t just research funds that became harder for her to get. Even her promotion became harder – the criteria to obtain the promotion have come to include fund generation more and more, so that fund-raising to keep the university running has become more important for promotion than the scientific merit or the intellectual rigor of one’s work. In Kariko’s case, it went so far as to hand her a demotion! Such is how World Bank dictates have dominated academia since the 1990s in the West and elsewhere. Today, you would find postdoctoral scientists who have lost their academic jobs and ended up as taxi drivers in countries such as Singapore.

Another evocative tale was that of Stanley Prusiner, who throughout the 1970s and 1980s carried out research on what is now called prions: living matter that does not use nucleic acids but proteins to transmit heritable traits from one generation to the next. Prusiner’s view – which was unorthodox if anything ever was – was heavily criticised by his colleagues. But the importance of his work became evident in the 1990s with the emergence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (‘mad cow disease’) and similar diseases in humans. He was, fortunately, able to continue his research throughout that period without getting demoted or losing his job, because that was before the pivotal 1990s. Eventually, Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997.

Lessons for us

According to the existing statute for higher education in our country (the Universities Act No. 16 of 1978 and its amendments), academics have been given a lot of freedom to determine the criteria for their own promotion. But unfortunately, in recent times, the academic hierarchy has been following the dictates of utilitarianism and ‘audit culture’ with increasing willingness and decreasing critical examination. Even the work in academia is shifting from actual academic work to work that serves the audit culture and managerialist practices, which undermines academic freedom and creates a top-down approach to academic direction. On top of that, the current government is planning to bring in a new statute, and what changes it would make to academic freedom remains to be seen.

What is important is to keep in mind that consequentialist methods, which judge the value of an action through short-term, easily measurable outcomes, shift the scientists’ focus away from their long-term role for the wider society to the short-term gains of the corporate industry. The academics are compelled to work for the prevailing official priorities of their workplace rather than for the weal of the wider society. The academics themselves can (and do) easily adjust to this situation and still go on to have successful careers, but the real losers are the silent segments of the wider society, whose needs are not the industry’s concern. Gradually, one of humanity’s greatest resources – the scientific mind – is put in the service of one small segment of society.

It is a time for our own academics to be informed and be vigilant. Otherwise, the days may not be far off when academics who follow independent lines of scientific inquiry or make an attempt to serve the wider society are demoted or sent off to drive three-wheelers. Along with that, the real value of original thinking could be lost, for the sake of industrial profits. The university is an odd place, because the academics go there to work, but actually (should) work for the benefit of not their workplace but the wider society from which it derives its fuller sustenance. Academics, especially academic scientists, must remember that.

Organisations that are supposed to serve the advancement of science ought to look at this seriously too. A science that does not serve the wider society is unjustifiable and valueless, because in the end it is that wider society that gives recognition and sustenance to the scientific enterprise.

Perhaps, we should not yet celebrate the rare success stories like Kariko’s. We should instead lament the many ideas that must have been lost to humanity, silently and forever. We should try to make such success stories more commonplace. We must protect academic freedom, for society’s sake. We must foster a direct relationship between scientists and the wider society.

The writer is a professor in the University of Colombo. The views expressed are his.