Penn Medicine: Where Hypocrisy Thrives and The Truth Hurts

 

One of the pleasures of Gregory Zuckerman's "The Shot to Save the World" is the portraits of the persons and personalities involved in one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time: The race to develop effective vaccines for COVID 19.

In the Michael Lewis mode of introducing the players and then just letting the story spin out from their stories, Zuckerman follows the dogged Dr. Katalin Kariko, who immigrates from Hungary, where nobody was interested in her zealous pursuit of mRNA as a potential platform for therapeutics, and winds up at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where the powers that be lose faith in her, demote her, kick her off the track to tenure, move her, virtually, to a broom closet, and where she feels humiliated and reviled. They do everything but out and out fire her, but she persists and eventually connects with Dr. Drew Weissman who thinks she might be on to something. Together, they publish the paper that opens the way for mRNA vaccines.

There were, as is so often true in science, many others working with mRNA but mostly people thought mRNA was simply too fragile and evanescent to hold much promise.

Now, unless there are others who can lay claim to the inspiration, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman are the obvious choice for the next Nobel Prize in Medicine. Like Banting and Best who uncovered and pushed insulin forward, this pair saved millions of lives despite the best efforts of competitors and colleagues alike to discourage them.

Kariko eventually felt so humiliated she left Penn and took a job in industry, but retained an "adjunct professor" status.

Now that mRNA is looming as one of the great advances in 21st century medicine, Penn has launched an advertising campaign to claim the credit for Kariko's accomplishments:

The ad running in the New York Times and elsewhere declaims:  "Their work has saved countless lives and will undoubtedly save countless more. Some may call it forward thinking. We call it changing the world. Penn Medicine. The birthplace of mRNA vaccines."

This is the classic wicked, scheming stepmother claiming the credit for Snow White's triumph at the Prince Charming ball.

Penn really has no shame. But it does have a department of communications, i.e., an in house marketing department, and those folks don't know from mRNA; all they know is they have a star and they are going to bask in the reflected glory, not to mention the patents for mRNA achieved through Kariko's efforts.

This is not a first for Penn:  There is the story of Leber amaurosis blindness, a form of congenital blindness which some Penn researchers discovered could be cured by a single injection in each eye in infancy. The details are difficult to track down, but the story as it has floated around is these scientists decided to charge $1 million per injection or $2 million for full, binocular vision. How did they arrive at this amazing price? They explained they went to court records and found that when someone lost vision in one eye, say in an industrial accident, juries typically awarded $1 million in damages. So that's what vision in a single eye is worth--or $2 million for restoring vision in 2 eyes. 

So this is forward thinking.

Penn calls it changing the world.