I TOLD YOU SO!

Why we need to listen to scientists.

Science tends to reward researchers from prestigious universities, who are usually English-speaking, white elderly males, writes Kaplan, a science correspondent for the Economist. Because of this bias, we lose the valuable voices of minority and immigrant researchers. In this informative study, Kaplan tells the stories of many heroes of science, including the Hungarian doctor in 1800s Austria who noticed that women giving birth in hospitals that used cadavers for teaching purposes died at a higher rate—as did their newborns—than those at hospitals that used other teaching tools. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis reasoned that because doctors didn’t wash their hands between corpse diving and baby delivery in the hospitals using cadavers, they transferred bacteria that often killed their obstetric patients and their newborns. Hostile hospital administrators, apparently seeing trouble if the news got out, fired Semmelweis and got him exiled back to Hungary. Perhaps the best recent example of “I told you so” is the story of Kati Karikό, on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania when she discovered that messenger RNA could help prevent disease from certain viruses. If the body’s immune cells could recognize attacks, that could prevent widespread infection in the body, Karikό reasoned. The key to making that happen was an mRNA-based vaccine that would set up the body to attack a virus if it appeared. When Karikό couldn’t get research grant money, the university first demoted her, then “threw [her] out of her lab.” The happy part of her story is that Karikό found a job at a company called BioNTech, which recognized when Covid-19 hit that she had the key to creating a vaccine to fight it. Her research led to the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine, which helped save millions of lives. Karikό and her colleague won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2023, perhaps the ultimate revenge for a scorned scientist.

An eloquent plea for reforming research funding and reducing bias in grant awards and peer review journals.