In 1995, the University of Pennsylvania demoted Katalin Karikó from her position on the faculty track. She had been unable to secure funding for her research on messenger RNA, work that seemed impractical and far-fetched to grant reviewers. Her salary was frozen. She was diagnosed with cancer the same year. Most scientists would have abandoned the project, pivoted to safer research areas, or left academia entirely. But Karikó continued, working in borrowed lab space, arriving at 6 AM on Sundays, pursuing an idea that virtually no one else believed in.
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| Katalin Karikó |
Eighteen years later, in 2013, the university forced her to retire. She had never received a major grant from the National Institutes of Health throughout her entire career. Her research on mRNA had been rejected by Nature and Science, the most prestigious journals in biology. Colleagues who started alongside her had become tenured professors with well-funded laboratories while she struggled to pay for parking. By every conventional measure, her research career was a failure.
Then came 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic erupted across the world, and within months, vaccines based on Karikó's decades of mRNA research were being developed at unprecedented speed. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, built on the foundations she had laid, proved remarkably effective. By early 2021, these vaccines were being administered to millions of people, saving countless lives. In 2023, Karikó was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The work that no one would fund had become one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the century.
This story is not a feel-good tale about perseverance triumphing over adversity. It is a horror story about a broken system. For every Katalin Karikó who somehow survives decades without support, how many brilliant researchers give up? How many transformative ideas die in unfunded laboratories? How many solutions to humanity's greatest challenges never materialize because our funding system cannot recognize potential until it has already been proven?
We need to talk about the research that never happens. The ideas that are too risky for conventional funders. The projects that are too long-term for institutions demanding quick results. The breakthroughs that never occur because the people capable of achieving them cannot secure the resources to try.
The Funders' Dilemma
The current system of research funding operates on a seemingly reasonable principle: support projects that are likely to succeed and produce valuable results. Grant reviewers ask whether proposed research builds on established methods, whether the investigator has a track record of success, whether the expected outcomes are clear and achievable. This approach minimizes waste and ensures that public and private money goes to credible researchers pursuing feasible goals.
But this same logic systematically excludes exactly the kind of research that generates revolutionary advances. Truly novel ideas, by definition, lack extensive prior work to build upon. Genuinely innovative approaches often come from researchers who have not yet established track records because they are proposing something fundamentally new. Breakthrough discoveries frequently emerge from unexpected directions and produce outcomes that no one could have clearly predicted in advance.
The history of science is filled with transformative work that would never have received funding under current criteria. When Karikó and her colleague Drew Weissman published their crucial paper on modified mRNA in 2005, reviewers at Nature and Science rejected it as not novel and not of broad interest. The work that would eventually enable lifesaving vaccines during a global pandemic was deemed unworthy of publication in top journals. If the gatekeepers of scientific publishing could not recognize its importance, how could we expect grant reviewers to have funded it years earlier when it was even more speculative?
Consider the characteristics of research that tends to get rejected by conventional funding mechanisms. It is often highly interdisciplinary, combining methods and insights from multiple fields in ways that do not fit neatly into established departmental structures or grant categories. It is frequently long-term, requiring years or decades of foundational work before practical applications emerge. It is typically high-risk, pursuing ideas that might fail completely rather than guaranteed incremental advances. It is sometimes pursued by researchers who are not part of elite institutions or who lack the social connections that help secure funding.
These are precisely the characteristics of research that generates paradigm shifts. The most important scientific breakthroughs often come from researchers willing to explore ideas that seem crazy to their peers, who work across traditional boundaries, who commit to long-term visions rather than short-term publications, and who operate outside the mainstream of their disciplines. Yet our funding system is designed to support safe, conventional, incremental work by established investigators at prestigious institutions.
The problem is not that individual grant reviewers or program officers are incompetent or malicious. The issue is structural. When reviewers must choose among many proposals competing for limited funds, they naturally gravitate toward projects they can confidently defend to their own supervisors and peers. A proposal to extend existing work using proven methods by a researcher with strong publications is defensible. A proposal to pursue an untested approach to a problem that might not even be well-defined by a researcher who has not yet established a major reputation is risky. Even if reviewers personally find the risky proposal exciting, they know it may not survive committee review or institutional scrutiny.
This creates a situation where the most transformative research often depends on researchers' ability to secure funding for conventional projects and then quietly use those resources to pursue their actual innovative ideas on the side. Many breakthroughs happen not because the funding system worked but because creative scientists figured out how to work around it. This is an enormously inefficient and ethically questionable way to advance human knowledge.
The Cost of Missing Breakthroughs
The consequences of our broken funding system extend far beyond individual researchers' careers. When genuinely innovative research goes unfunded, we all lose the benefits that work might have generated. In Karikó's case, the delay in developing mRNA vaccine technology likely cost millions of lives. If her work had been properly supported in the 1990s and early 2000s, we might have had mRNA vaccines available years or even decades earlier, ready to deploy against emerging infectious diseases, cancer, and other conditions.
But we have no way of knowing how many other Katalin Karikós are out there right now, struggling to fund research that could transform medicine, technology, or our understanding of the world. We cannot count the breakthroughs that never happen. We cannot measure the lives not saved, the problems not solved, the opportunities not seized because brilliant researchers could not secure support for their ideas.
Think about the major challenges facing humanity today. Climate change, which threatens global stability and billions of lives, demands innovative approaches to energy, agriculture, materials science, and social organization. We need researchers willing to pursue radical solutions, not just incremental improvements to existing technologies. Yet how many potential breakthrough approaches to carbon capture, renewable energy, or climate adaptation never get explored because they seem too speculative to funders?
The next pandemic could emerge at any time, and we need researchers working on broad-spectrum antiviral strategies, better vaccine platforms, and innovative approaches to public health. But if our funding system could not support Karikó's mRNA work when infectious disease research was already well-established, how can we expect it to fund the next generation of unconventional approaches to pandemic preparedness?
Artificial intelligence and biotechnology are raising profound questions about human enhancement, privacy, governance, and the future of work. We need researchers from diverse disciplines thinking creatively about these challenges. Yet the funding system tends to support work that fits into existing categories rather than genuinely transdisciplinary research that crosses boundaries between computer science, biology, philosophy, social science, and policy.
Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide despite decades of research. While we have made real progress, we need researchers willing to question fundamental assumptions and pursue unconventional approaches. Some of the most promising recent developments in cancer treatment have come from immunotherapy strategies that were initially considered too risky by mainstream funders.
Mental health conditions affect hundreds of millions of people and contribute to enormous human suffering and economic costs. Yet research on novel therapeutic approaches, particularly those that challenge established paradigms in psychiatry and neuroscience, struggles to find support. Psychedelic-assisted therapy, which is now showing remarkable promise for treatment-resistant depression and PTSD, spent decades in the wilderness with virtually no funding because the research was considered too controversial.
The pattern repeats across every field. The research that could most transform our world is precisely the research our funding system is least equipped to support.
What Alternative Funding Models Look Like
We do not need to imagine from scratch what better funding systems might look like. Alternative models already exist, though they operate at scales too small to compensate for the broader system's failures. Understanding these alternatives can help us think about how to fund the research that never happens under conventional mechanisms.
Some private foundations have pioneered approaches specifically designed to support high-risk, high-reward research. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, provides long-term funding directly to exceptional scientists rather than to specific projects, giving researchers freedom to pursue ambitious ideas without constant grant applications. This model has supported numerous breakthroughs that conventional funding might never have enabled.
Philanthropists interested in particular challenges have sometimes funded research that government agencies and corporations would not touch. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested billions in global health challenges that offered no commercial return and seemed too difficult for traditional funders. Peter Thiel's foundation has supported young researchers pursuing unconventional ideas before they have established traditional credentials. While these efforts have limitations and raise their own questions about accountability and priorities, they demonstrate that alternative funding models can enable research that the mainstream system rejects.
Some countries have experimented with funding mechanisms specifically designed for risky research. The European Research Council created grants for early-career investigators pursuing ambitious projects. The National Science Foundation in the United States established programs for transformative research that explicitly seek high-risk, high-reward proposals. While these programs are steps in the right direction, they remain small relative to the overall research funding ecosystem and still often operate within conventional evaluation frameworks.
Venture capital has played an increasingly important role in funding certain types of research, particularly in biotechnology and technology. While venture funding introduces its own biases toward commercially viable applications, it has supported some research that academic funders rejected as too speculative. Companies like BioNTech, where Karikó eventually found support for her mRNA work, operate with longer time horizons and higher risk tolerance than traditional academic funding can accommodate.
Crowdfunding and direct public support have emerged as alternative mechanisms for some research, though they remain limited in scale and tend to support work that can be easily communicated to general audiences. Still, they demonstrate public appetite for supporting ambitious science, even when traditional funders are skeptical.
What these alternative models share is a willingness to bet on people and ideas rather than just on proven track records and guaranteed outcomes. They accept that many risky projects will fail but that the successes can be transformative enough to justify the failures. They provide longer-term support that allows researchers to pursue ambitious goals rather than forcing them to generate publications on short funding cycles. They often give researchers more autonomy to redirect their work as they learn rather than locking them into rigid project plans.
Our Vision for Funding Tomorrow's Breakthroughs
At The Ilantic Journal, we believe that transforming how we fund research is as important as transforming how we publish it. The two are inseparable. If brilliant researchers cannot secure resources to pursue innovative ideas, there will be nothing groundbreaking to publish. If journals only publish safe, conventional work, funders will see no evidence that risky research can succeed.
We are committed to building connections between researchers pursuing ambitious projects and funders willing to support work that conventional mechanisms reject. This means creating networks that link scientists with private philanthropists, venture capitalists, foundations, and corporations interested in breakthrough research. It means helping researchers articulate the potential of their work in ways that inspire confidence even without guaranteed outcomes. It means documenting and publicizing the successes of research that was initially deemed too risky, showing funders what becomes possible when they take chances.
We actively seek to publish research that other journals might reject as too speculative, too unconventional, or too far from practical application. When we find work that represents genuinely new thinking, we do not just publish it and move on. We work to connect those researchers with potential funders, to build visibility for their ideas, to create opportunities for them to present their work to audiences beyond academia.
We maintain relationships with funders who share our commitment to supporting transformative research. We introduce them to researchers whose work we believe deserves support, even when that work is at early stages and outcomes are uncertain. We help funders understand why particular projects represent promising bets despite their risks. We provide forums where researchers and funders can meet, discuss ideas, and build relationships that lead to support for ambitious work.
We also document and study the funding journeys of breakthrough research. By tracking which projects struggled to find support, how researchers eventually secured resources, and what characterized funders willing to take risks, we can learn lessons that help improve the system. We publish case studies showing how transformative research happens, including the often-messy reality of funding struggles, failed experiments, and eventual breakthroughs.
Importantly, we are building a community of researchers who support each other in pursuing ambitious work. Early-career scientists pursuing risky projects often feel isolated, surrounded by colleagues who question their choices and advisors who encourage safer paths. By creating networks where researchers pursuing unconventional work can connect, share experiences, and support each other, we hope to make it easier for talented people to stay committed to their visions even when funding is elusive.
We recognize that not all underfunded research deserves support. Some ideas are genuinely bad, some researchers lack the skills to execute ambitious projects, and some proposals are appropriately rejected. We are not advocating for blind support of any work that claims to be innovative. But we believe the current system errs too far in the direction of caution, that too many good ideas go unfunded, and that we can do better at identifying and supporting research with transformative potential.
The Research Waiting to Happen
Right now, somewhere, there are researchers with ideas that could change the world. They have insights that could lead to breakthroughs in medicine, technology, sustainability, or our understanding of fundamental questions. They have the creativity, intelligence, and commitment to pursue these ideas through years of difficult work. But they cannot secure funding because their proposals seem too risky, too unconventional, too far from guaranteed success.
Some of them will give up, will pivot to safer research areas, will take industry jobs or leave science entirely. Others will persist like Katalin Karikó did, working in borrowed labs with minimal resources, hoping to survive long enough for the world to recognize the value of their work. A very few will somehow find the support they need through unconventional channels or sheer luck.
But we should not accept this as inevitable. We should not require researchers to spend decades in poverty and precarity pursuing ideas that could benefit billions. We should not waste the talents of brilliant people who could be solving critical problems if only they had resources to try.
The next mRNA vaccine equivalent is out there right now, underfunded or unfunded entirely. The next CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough is waiting to happen if the right researcher can secure support. The next fundamental insight that will transform a field is gestating in someone's mind, unable to progress because grants get rejected.
We are building infrastructure to find these researchers, to connect them with funders, to support their work until it can demonstrate its value. We are creating a parallel funding ecosystem for research that the mainstream system cannot accommodate. We are documenting and celebrating the breakthroughs that emerge from risky work, showing the world what becomes possible when we invest in potential rather than just in proof.
This is not charity. This is not about being nice to struggling researchers. This is about ensuring that humanity benefits from the best ideas our scientists can generate, that we do not lose crucial breakthroughs because our funding system cannot see beyond conventional criteria, that the research that should happen actually does happen.
Katalin Karikó spent nearly thirty years pursuing an idea that almost no one would fund. Her persistence gave us vaccines that saved millions of lives during a global pandemic. How many millions of lives could be saved if we ensured that the next Katalin Karikó does not have to wait thirty years for support? How many critical problems could we solve if we funded the research that conventional mechanisms reject?
We believe that radical solutions to major challenges are not generated in laboratories alone but require adequate resources to pursue ambitious ideas. We believe that the most transformative research often seems impossible until someone proves it works. We believe that we can build better systems for identifying and supporting breakthrough research before it becomes obvious to everyone.
The research that never happens is the research we cannot afford to lose. Join us in building a future where brilliant ideas receive the support they deserve, where researchers can pursue transformative work without decades of struggle, where the next breakthrough is not delayed by a broken funding system. The solutions we need are waiting to be discovered. We need to make sure they get the chance.