And the demotion was for focusing on the less and less popular mRNA with idea of using it for vaccines, instead of something that would bring grant funding.
She was demoted precisely for doing what led to the techniques used by Biontech and Moderna.
It wasn't political or that someone had some beef with her research at Penn. Ultimately a requirement for academic labs is that you need to find a way to pay for your own research, because there just isn't money otherwise. Schools provide some startup funds to early career professors to get things going and equipment purchased, maybe a few salaries covered for a time, but the expectation is that they start securing their own funding themselves by writing grants to funding agencies calling for research in certain areas. This is why most Principle Investigators (PIs) are in their offices writing grants and keeping up with calls for proposals from funding agencies, and not in the lab toiling over experiments; gotta keep the funding coming and everyone under your wing employed. In my experience when PIs failed to secure grant money, at that point the lab had already spooled down and there isn't any more salaries to pay, and they usually just transitioned to a teaching professor role or a more administrative role in the department, covering their salary through those efforts rather than grant funding.
Exactly. Her moving to BioNTech seems to have been the best outcome possible... even though I completely understand her sourness at Penn. But it sounds like she’ll get the last laugh and can call out Penn for its lack of vision.
yeah, and it is entirely possible that developing mRNA technology simply wasn't a good fit for Penn, even if it was long term viable and within their ability to fund.
It it seems pretty unfair to say that "the school wasn’t very supportive of the scientist who led the charge."
They gave her 6 years runway while she tried to find external funding and get the technology off the ground before kicking her off tenure, and kept her on payroll until the she made her breakthrough another 10 years later.
If I understand the timeline right, she started at Penn in 89, was kicked off tenure in 95, published her major mRNA paper in 2005, then left Penn to be a senior VP in 2013.
