Anger at Univ of Penn for claiming 2023 Nobel prize winner as their own: they demoted her [View all]

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/10/03/researcher-demoted-by-university-of-pennsylvania-wins-nobel-prize-for-mrna-discoveries-and-some-academics-urge-penn-to-apologize/

Researcher Demoted By University Of Pennsylvania Wins Nobel Prize For mRNA Discoveries—And Some Academics Urge Penn To Apologize

Katalin Karikó won this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine alongside Drew Weissman for their research that led to the development of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, but a post from the University of Pennsylvania—where Karikó was demoted from tenure track in 1995—claiming her as a Penn researcher angered the medical community.

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Karikó was hired by the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 as an adjunct professor and researcher, where she met and began collaborating with Weissman, a professor of medicine at Penn, in 1997.
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Though initially on track to become a tenured professor, the university reportedly offered Karikó a choice to either leave or be demoted with a pay cut in 1995—which she said was “particularly horrible” because she had just been diagnosed with cancer and her husband was stuck in Hungary because of a visa issue—because her mRNA research was deemed too risky and did not attract enough grant funding.



Karikó took the demotion and continued her work, but later left her senior research investigator position at Penn (where she retains an adjunct professorship) in 2013 to serve as vice president at BioNTech—co-manufacturer of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine—because Penn refused to reinstate her to a tenure track position, reportedly considering her research “not of faculty quality.”

Penn congratulated Karikó and Weissman for their Nobel Prize win on Monday in an X post, calling them “Penn’s historic mRNA vaccine research team” and attaching a university news release (which does not acknowledge Karikó’s tense history with Penn)—but a community note applied to the post calls the wording “misleading” because she left the university as a researcher a decade ago.