It has been roughly a year since I wrote this post on the Nobel Prize. The reason why it is coming up again in my life probably marks the beginning of what I call the Nobel season. I actually felt very conflicted internally when I published the original post, mainly because I was not sure what connotations I was making with the way I wrote it. Much as I tried to dwell on the semantics of every statement, I felt like it went against the logic of blog-writing, which is to jot down less-than-polished thoughts in favor of off-the-cuff authenticity. So here I am, giving some thoughts as a new Nobel season is starting.

It was announced today that the Nobel prize in (physiology or) medicine is going to the scientists whose fundamental research paved the way for mRNA vaccines, which proved crucial to the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a lot of rightful apprehension regarding the speediness of the vaccines’ approval. It takes a lot of being in the know to weed away the conspiratorial cacophony that drowns out legitimate critiques, and most of the times the loudest voices are social media grifters who found some ways to profit off of social anxiety, regardless of how much scientific background they have. In some ways, the advent of mRNA vaccines was nothing short of miraculous. It is a very elegant concept that was catalyzed by the critical demands of the times, an opportune deployment of theoretically perfected science that, the more you read about it in good faith, the more you would thank the advances of modern science.

This demonstrates the core tenets of science that are nominally (read: supposedly) embedded in the design of contemporary academia. That research is not a linear progression, but rather an extremely strenuous process whose ebbs and flows are flattened by the privilege of hindsight. The vaccines were not just developed the moment COVID-19 became a real threat. There is so much history that underlies the development of such a product, which could trace back to the 1960s or since the start of these scientists’ careers. Scientific research has grown to a level of speed that has to embrace failures and subsume patterns of seemingly no growth; the results do not simply speak for themselves. This is not to say that it is all a game of roulette, that luck guides science. But too often, there is an emphasis to equate research output (quantity, quality, and impact) with the soundness of the researcher: an impatience to conclude that people are mediocre for producing mediocre results.

How is this relevant in the current times? There have been two recently publicized instances of researchers, ironically studying the psychology of cheaters, being accused of fabricating their data. Arguably, incredible insights from their research played a major contributing factor to their tenure, whereby the big-A Administration has determined that they are brilliant enough to be permanently employed as a professor, or other ways they have maintained their relevancy in academia, be it popular culture or book publishing. Throughout college, I was made aware of several other instances of professors who got tenure for works that were later proven fraudulent. The difficult part here is that fact-checking or replication work do not earn you reputation, while ground-breaking, once-in-a-lifetime results do. So there is always an incentive to find something new, to p-hack your studies (read: find a way to produce a statistically significant result, which can be as simple as achieving a sufficiently low p-value for a null hypothesis) no matter what cost. Fact-checking is time-consuming and demotivated anyways.

Katalin Karikó, one of the two recipients of the 2023 Nobel Prize, actually had her seminal work rejected by Science, arguably a holy grail of research in her field and some others, as well as demoted by the University of Pennsylvania when this work was not gaining traction. Perhaps the first instinct, upon hearing this tidbit, is to laugh at these big-I Institutions and say, wow, so much for being a pillar of scientific progress when twenty years ago you were so oblivious to something of tremendous social consequence. I think the truth is more nuanced than that. Of course hindsight is rich: if her work never came to fruition and found its time as it did, then would we say Science and UPenn had always been right? But thinking that science is just right or wrong is fallacious. It is right until it is wrong again, then something more right came to light and science progresses. It does not mean that my research was bad, implying I was a bad researcher, unless I intentionally manipulated my Excel sheets; it should prove the opposite, that I have abided by the virtues of scientific research and corrected myself when new information came to light.

The problem is in fact in the impatience, of us, of the big-A Administrations and big-I Institutions. The rewards of tenure, or salary, or reputation-dependent appointments are so intertwined with the structures of modern academia as authoritative figures that preside over the legitimacy of someone’s work. Katalin Karikó’s demotion at the university stood out to me more than the paper rejection, because that involved aspects of her life beyond the work itself: she had her salary cut and faced threats of deportation. If your employment was at risk and there was an increasing amount of pressure to prove your capacity, would you be tempted to p-hack your results? If we had accepted that scientific outcomes are not simple in their progressions, how was she supposed to argue for herself against the big-As and big-Is? It is really funny to see UPenn claiming credit to her accomplishment today, as it stands fundamentally opposed to their logic and conclusions by kicking out Katalin Karikó.

I had a talk with a middle-school friend who was working at a national lab in Vietnam. He was asking me about higher-education scholarships abroad, and I wanted to know more about how chemistry research worked in my home country. He said that the researchers were always in a tricky situation where, if they failed to deliver every deliverable they had promised in their grant proposals, they were required to return part of the money. This led to the reality that researchers were only working on problems that are somewhat easy to solve. It also meant that they could not achieve results of the same significance as foreign-based researchers, as the risk tolerance was low.

With the way the capitalistic society has manifested, it is hard to imagine we will get back to the academic utopia where science just unravels without the complications of the flow of money. This is true for a country with lower R&D investment like Vietnam, but somehow still true for a research behemoth like the United States. There is always someone who decides if your research is promising enough, which is based on whether you are promising enough, which loops into your and your institutions’ risk tolerance levels. More pernicious is whether you can even afford to live the life of a researcher, as someone who barely makes enough in their twenties and has to constantly face judgement of your own worth, in a place where lack of promotion (read: ability to secure tenure) means you are fired. Once science has become infiltrated by the language of investment, then it has surrendered a sense of purity that might continually leave it to contend with uncomfortable counterfactuals. What if Katalin Karikó was never let go by the University? The logic of maximizing for returns means that someone has to absorb the risks, that risk-to-reward is a metric that can be calculated and commodified in the marketplace of ideas. Is the private sector a strictly better version of academia nowadays, as it can regulate its risk management more efficiently? Could we imagine a world where mRNA vaccines never was a reality as expeditiously as it was?

In a way I feel vindicated by these revelations, regarding my previous writing. Last time, however, I focused more on the perspective of the researcher; this time, I took it upon myself to try dissecting the motives that underpin modern academia, somewhat hoping to isolate good research from the social construction of a good researcher. Perhaps I am spending a lot of thought in this matter because I, too, have to consider the pathways that I eventually have to commit to, as a research enthusiast. Where is research most likely to happen? Where is impact most likely felt? How can I safeguard myself from the ways my research might impact my life beyond my laboratory? As someone who has not outgrown the poverty mindset yet wanting to venture in the riskiest professions, it is hard for me to clarify what exactly my gut is telling me. I hope to retain faith in the system, and perhaps that is all that I can do to salvage myself from wasting my own future.