Penn’s Nobel Prize winner wasn’t on the tenure track. How can the system better support talent?

More than 30 years ago, Jean Bennett toiled away in spaces in the far end of a University of Pennsylvania cardiology laboratory. She didn’t have funding or resources, but she did have great ideas and enthusiasm that couldn’t be dampened.

“I was told I should leave the tenure track because I’d never make it,” she recalled.

But she persisted, and went on to develop the nation’s first gene therapy approved for a genetic disease in which a corrective gene is injected into a patient. It’s used to treat a rare form of blindness. She got tenure, too.

» READ MORE: A Penn official once told Katalin Karikó she was ‘not of faculty quality.’ Her work there just won a Nobel Prize.

Katalin Karikó, the scientist who worked beside her in those early days, didn’t. She wasn’t even on the tenure track, and was once told by a Penn official she was “not of faculty quality,” she says.

As the world now knows, Karikó and her colleague Drew Weissman went on to win the Nobel Prize this month for their discoveries about messenger RNA, which led to the development of the first COVID-19 vaccines.

Bennett, a professor emeritus of ophthalmology who has had a decades-long career at Penn, said things have certainly gotten better for young female scientists since she and Karikó had their struggles, including better pay, better treatment and better support.

» READ MORE: Gene therapy successful on blindness

But Bennett, as well as several other academics in the region, said stories like theirs are cautionary tales for universities deciding whom to grant tenure. While grant dollars and peer-researched publication tallies often weigh heaviest in tenure decisions for those in the sciences, schools should look carefully at their processes to make sure those creative, out-of-the-box thinkers with potential are not lost.

» READ MORE: How hard is it to get tenure at Philly-area universities?

“Every university should take a look,” Bennett said, “and make sure they are not overlooking some gems. It would break my heart to know of other people who were overlooked and left science because they just couldn’t get support and had great ideas and talents.”

Though processes vary among universities and disciplines, academics who are destined for the tenure track generally begin as assistant professors and are considered for tenure in their fifth, sixth or seventh year. (Physician faculty usually get more time.) During that time, they are expected to build a case for why they should be granted tenure, which is basically lifetime job security.

Those who are put up for tenure and don’t get it are faced with having to leave the institution after one additional year.

In the sciences, colleges tend to give a lot of weight to grant or research dollars professors bring in to do their work, as well as the quantity and quality of peer-reviewed publications in top journals in their field.

Karikó was not on the tenure track, and those who are close to her say that wasn’t really her goal, though if she had been able to attain grant funding for her work, it would have opened the door for her to seek a tenure track position. Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine did not answer specific questions about its tenure process.

» READ MORE: Phila. researchers bring sight to the blind

But others in academia were willing to weigh in on the subject.

Any system that repeatedly snubs someone with the talent to win a Nobel Prize probably deserves scrutiny, said Jeffery L. Osgood Jr., interim executive vice president and provost of West Chester University.

“An institution that missed an opportunity with somebody like this really needs to look deeply at their processes,” he said. “I’d be happy to give her a position.”

The tenure system, especially in the sciences at large research universities, isn’t set up to reward maverick thinkers whose ideas might seem extreme, yet those are the people who may go on to win a Nobel Prize, said several academics.

“At a lot of these places, everything is based off of how much money you are bringing in,” said Brian DeHaven, formerly an associate professor of biology at La Salle University, who now works at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. “In some cases, the job appointment is lab space and you’re on your own for everything else. It incentivizes the sort of stepwise publishable stuff that actually stifles real innovation.”

But he also acknowledged that Kariko’s story isn’t all that uncommon.

“What she might have lacked is what most new investigators need but don’t always get — someone experienced in the current system to help her write the grant proposals and papers likely to be funded and published,” he said.

Laura A. Siminoff, a Temple University professor of social and behavioral sciences, recalled her own struggles when she was trying to get tenure at the University of Pittsburgh medical school, which she got in 2005. She was so disgusted by then that she left for another university. She said she saw her male colleagues get put up for tenure ahead of her, even though she had equivalent or greater accomplishments.

“I had to beg them to put me up for tenure, even though I had millions of dollars in grant money,” said Siminoff, a public health scientist who had been dean of Temple’s college of public health for eight years until 2022.

While it has gotten somewhat better for women, she said she still hears similar challenges from young female assistant professors. She said she has seen the same issues every place she has worked, including Pitt, Temple, Case Western Reserve University and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Those seeking tenure need someone to champion them and mentor them, and women and people of color don’t get that often enough, she said. The system also isn’t set up to support women who may be seeking tenure during the childbearing years.

Universities should make sure women are given salary and research support packages commensurate with men as they start on their journey toward tenure.

Bennett, the Penn professor, recalled how she and Karikó supported each other in the early days.

“People thought we were crazy and overly ambitious,” she said. “We both thought what each other wanted to do was terrific.”

Hard-pressed for funds, they improvised.

“Neither of us had an independent budget or funding, so we sometimes got creative with our supplies,” Karikó wrote in her book released this month, Breaking Through: My Life in Science. “For example, I often purchased Hungarian pickles in bulk, in oversize jars. I began saving these jars; in the lab, we’d sterilize them, then use them ...”

There were few women like them, and both were doing their work while raising children.

Bennett recalled only two women in the medical school who had made it to full professors, neither of whom had children. One of them took her out to lunch.

“You can do it, Jean,” she was told. “You just have to put on the jets. You have to say yes to every invitation to lecture, go to every meeting and just prove to people that you can do it.”

Karikó told the Chronicle of Higher Education that she would like to see a system where colleagues who have already achieved prime status could advocate for those whose work shows promise. She suggested that discretionary grant funds be set aside and awarded for that work so those promising scientists can continue their research.

Asked if Penn should make changes in its process, Karikó said by email: “Recognize talented, hardworking scientists full of ideas.”

Staff writer Tom Avril contributed to this article.