Female scientist
Image courtesy of The Non-Anxious Leader
They say the average overnight success takes about ten years. Sometimes it takes nearly three times that.
In 1993, Katalin Kariko, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, had a big idea. She theorized that messenger RNA (mRNA) could be used to create medicines that delivered life-saving proteins to cure diseases. She was onto something.
The problem was that few people paid attention to her idea. Here are four leadership lessons that I learned from her story and that of her collaborator, Drew Weissman.
Persistence comes from belief in your mission.
Kariko spent most of career being different than those around her. She was a Hungarian immigrant, PhD in a department run by MD’s. She was a woman in a male-dominated field. But she persisted.
Kariko believed that her idea could make a difference. She experienced rejection and, worse yet, indifference. Most of her work yielded failure. She went decades without major funding or recognition. Yet, her idea literally impacted our entire world.
Collaboration is essential.
In 1997, Kariko met Penn immunologist, Drew Weissman. His big idea was to use dendritic cells, a special type of immune cell, to develop life-saving vaccines.
Kariko shared her idea about mRNA and Weissman guessed that it might be the delivery mechanism for dendritic cells. He asked if she would synthesize mRNA for his work, and she agreed.
One wonders where we would be if Kariko had kept her ideas to herself.
When you get stuck, change your perspective.
Weissman was much like Kariko in that he focused on solving problems, not gaining recognition. He had a unique way of getting unstuck when he was working on a difficult problem. As this article documents:
“When Weissman ran into a problem in the lab, he would often start a project at home. Build a deck. Do some plumbing. Put an addition onto the house.
Often, while he labored on something completely different, he would find a way to solve the problem he was ramming into at work.”
I would call this the Holy Spirit at work. Thinking about something 24/7 will only keep you stuck. Giving God space to work is often the way forward. To do this, you need to get your mind in a different place. Prayer and meditation can do this. But sometimes it’s ordinary activities that can spark our creativity. Whether it’s taking a walk, cooking a meal or reading a story to a child, getting a different perspective can open your mind to the work of the Spirit.
Focus on effort, not outcome.
Kariko and Weissman experienced many more “failures” than successes. They were not deterred. Instead, they understood that everything they did produced some kind of learning. Kariko paraphrases Leonard Da Vinci when she says, “Experiments never err, your expectations do.”
In 2005, Kariko and Weissman made a major breakthrough. Until then, they struggled with the fact that when mRNA was used to deliver immune cells it triggered an inflammatory response. They made a small adjustment to the genetic code and solved the problem. They expected to get recognition in the scientific community, as well as major funding to explore their idea. Neither came. They kept working.
When you focus on doing the work, the fact that you don’t get the recognition or results you hope for doesn’t deter you. It’s part of the process.
Kariko and Weissman recently received the 2021 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, which often precedes a Nobel Prize. Their work was the basis for both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccines. Countless others worked on making the vaccines possible. But it can be argued that none of it was possible without the three decades of work by Kariko and Weissman.
Impact takes time. Go change the world.