Bamboo Principle

QUOTE

Saadi Shirazi once said…

“All things are difficult before they become easy.”

(Persian poet)

CONCEPT

Bamboo Principle

The Bamboo Principle takes its name from moso bamboo, which spends its first several years producing almost nothing above ground. To an observer, the plot looks like failed farming. Underground, the plant is building an enormous root network—and once that network is established, a single shoot can reach 50 to 70 feet in one growing season.

Like with the moso bamboo, long stretches of apparent stagnation are often periods of invisible infrastructure-building. The hard part is that from the outside (and sometimes from the inside) root-building and failure look identical.

STORY

An Overnight Success … Thirty-Five Years in the Making?

In 1985, a 30-year-old Hungarian biochemist boarded a plane to Philadelphia with her husband, her two-year-old daughter, and roughly £900 sewn into the child's teddy bear—the proceeds of selling their car on the black market, and everything the family owned.

Katalin Karikó believed messenger RNA could one day instruct human cells to make their own medicine. Almost nobody else did. RNA was considered too unstable, too impractical, too likely to trigger a destructive immune response. Experiments with it failed constantly.

Her first American job, at Temple University, ended in a clash with her supervisor severe enough that she needed a lawyer to avoid deportation. She landed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and applied for NIH grant after NIH grant.

She was rejected every time.

In January 1995, two things happened: She was diagnosed with breast cancer. And Penn gave her an ultimatum: abandon mRNA, or take a demotion off the tenure track with a pay cut.

She took the demotion.

Her salary eventually fell below that of her own technician. She was demoted four times in total. Her survival strategy, by her own description, was to make herself too cheap to be worth firing.

In 1997, she met immunologist Drew Weissman at a photocopier (can’t make this up). Over eight years, they solved mRNA's central problem and submitted their findings in 2005. The paper was rejected several times before finally being published … and was met with crickets.

In 2013, Karikó left Penn for a company called BioNTech (colleagues reportedly laughed that it didn't even have a website).

Then, in January 2020, a novel coronavirus was sequenced. Within weeks, BioNTech and Moderna both recognized that the Karikó-Weissman modification was the fastest route to a vaccine. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was designed in days, showed 95% efficacy in Phase 3 trials, and was authorized on December 11, 2020. Billions of doses followed.

In October 2023, Karikó and Weissman received a Nobel Prize in Medicine.