Sometimes Vindication Happens

I am thrilled to see Dr. Katalin Karikó and her research partner Dr. Drew Weissman win the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work on messenger RNA (mRNA).

It’s not just that their years of work provided the basis for the mRNA vaccines against Covid that have saved so many lives and protected even more people from serious illness. More important to me is that Dr. Karikó stuck to her research despite being shoved aside — she’s an adjunct professor — and never getting grants.

She believed in the potential for mRNA and she was right even though no one paid any attention to her except Dr. Weissman. “No one” includes prestigious journals like Nature and Science.

There are a lot of implications in all this.

First, I find Dr. Karikó an excellent role model for scientists, inventors, writers, artists, activists, and the many others who have a vision of something that can be done. Hang in there. You might succeed in what you’re doing and even might be recognized for it.

But let’s admit that being recognized is a long shot, especially in one’s lifetime. All too many of our great artists and even scientists died broke, with their work only being acknowledged much later.

I suspect it is even more common that people do good work that never gets noticed, maybe never even gets used. It’s not them, it’s the system, and we are all the poorer for those losses.

And of course, some people hang onto a vision that is, in fact, lunacy. In truth, though, I think far more people who have a vision worth pursuing give up because it’s too damn hard.

I tend to hope that everyone who sees something important, something vital, something perhaps only they see stays with it despite a lack of support. This is core to our humanity.

But some of the other implications are disturbing.

For one thing, I’m pretty sure that Dr. Karikó’s career was sidelined because of misogyny and perhaps because as an immigrant without much money she didn’t have clout. I doubt it had much to do with merit. (I’m currently reading Arline T. Geronimus’s book Weathering, and I can see how her thesis that unjust society puts extraordinary stress on marginalized people would apply to Dr. Karikó.)

The other reason no one was funding the research is that the pharmaceutical industry and perhaps even the government and other research funders didn’t see a big profit in mRNA.

Of course, the people who made the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have reaped a lot of profit, much of it from government investment. But until the pandemic hit, no one thought it was important.

Now I suspect there will be other vaccines, with perhaps great improvement in some, because the lines for profit are obvious.

It seems to me that Dr. Karikó’s experience shows some very deep flaws in how we as a society figure out how to fund research. There’s certainly more money to be made in playing games with drug patents and coming up with new uses for old drugs, not to mention trying to convince regulators that very expensive drugs that do very little, if anything — say ones for Alzheimer’s, since people are desperate for treatment for that — should be paid for by Medicare.

In the US, there has long been a bias against funding “pure” research, that is research that doesn’t have any obvious and immediate use. But near as I can tell, most things that turn out to be useful started out as “I wonder what would happen” research.

As with most things, you don’t always know where something will lead, so following something that just looks interesting may well provide a basis for something life-saving fifty years from now. Short-term thinking is almost always short-sighted.

Dr. Karikó has been vindicated, but don’t forget that kind of vindication is very rare.

That said, I’d like to encourage everyone to do the work they think matters, regardless of whether it pays. I realize this is a world that revolves around money and that not having enough to live decently makes life very difficult.

But if you believe in your work, find a way to do it. I won’t say starve; I’d probably say find a day job that doesn’t drive you nuts and gives you time for your work. But don’t give it up just because something else might make you rich or at least give you what passes for normal life.

Having enough to get by on without stress is important, but rich isn’t. And normal is highly overrated.

Do what you love, but don’t expect to be vindicated.

But do join me in being glad to see that Dr. Karikó was.