Sure, not a bad view and I don't know much about Brunkow and how she works, to be clear... but: you do need all these things in order to get academic funding so you can work on your ideas. Which I am not saying is a great system, it isn't, but I don't think it is easy to say these days to academic reseachers, especially early career ones, to not care too much about publications.

Edit: it is also the fallacy of saying, look she made it like that, so you can too! While she is likely a massive exception to the rule.

As someone outside of academia, seeing the phrase only 34 papers feels like being shot in the face

Important additional context on this... TLDR is that the post is only a "feel-good" post and misrepresented reality; real life is a lot more nuanced and fucked up

Mary E Brunkow solely worked in industry (a.k.a. the scientific slang for working in something like a pharmaceuticals cpmpany) after her PhD, instead of in academia like most Nobel Prize laureates. Industry researchers rarely publish. And 34 published papers may seem low by Nobel standards but is a lot. I don't think I personally know any industry researchers that are this prolific; some full professors even don't have this many papers

The bigger takeaway from this story is not "anyone can make it" if they have a good idea... Brunkow was extremely prolific as a researcher. A better takeaway may be instead of focusing on an individual solution, systematically why academia has such an excessive focus on publication metrics; people are trying to move away from it which is good. Another thing: her old company (Celltech) went defunct in 2004 and Brunkow was allegedly laid off (and no one at the time realized the importance of her discovery) which is probably a better take home message

Her Wikipedia page as reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_E._Brunkow.

Also some discussion about this on r/labrats if anyone wants to go over to the forbidden site: https://reddit.com/r/labrats/comments/1o1pgo1/mary_e_brunkow_one_of_this_years_nobel_prize

A lot of academia's problems are just Capitalism's perversion on display: incentivizing the wrong thing in every case. But it's also not in such bad shape as the anti-science grifters (e.g. Hossenfelder) like to pretend

No one was mentioning what Mary Elizabeth Brunkow did. Mary Elizabeth Brunkow (born 1961) is an American molecular biologist and immunologist. She is known for co-identifying the gene later named FOXP3 as the cause of the scurfy mouse phenotype, a finding that became foundational for modern regulatory T cell biology.

Science ranking is one more bullshit to deal nowadays. Like if the discovery of something new in a fiels ia going to care about how many medals you have hanging from your suit.

This is literally the bullshit that science magazines and publication entities love the most.

I had colleagues going to someones courses or presentation just because that persom had high publications score, no care about if it's even interesting what that person did.

Are we trying to choke science with publications? Any dumbass can publish tons of stuff like a news reporter, does it matter? Apparently yes. Should it matter? No.

There's rankings for scientists?

I mean sure, as long as I don't care about getting tenure or finding a permanent position...

I have a high school friend who owns a paper mill. He was a rich kid who never did the work, and always took credit for others work.

He has an h-index of 90 and 200,000 citations. He is not a professor.

*But also do it in your free time after your real job and do it for free

It really is amazing any non-corporate research ever gets this far.

And, before the prize fame, was she able to afford a comfortable home and a family without clout chasing?

The three pathways for most academics

Option 1 - shit out a large pile of bad (either misleading, over-sensationalised, or just clearly partial work) papers, but get funding to do the same for another year.

Option 2 - work hard to create a quality paper, run out of time, no more funding, off you go to industry.

Option 3 - take a teaching intensive role and never have any time for research, oh and also get paid less than in industry.

alot of phds are just making paper after paper which could be considered low quality, just to have thier CV presentable. if you paper has nothing valuable or its an exact clone of another paper, its not really innovative, ive read some papers are just to similar to another, or its just speculation type of study/research.

Quality over quantity.

What's an H-index

I can win a Nobel prize too is what i gain from this?

I will be forever grateful that my PI for my doctorate focused on technical and scientific hands-on skills rather than sitting at a desk and writing papers. It helped me much more in my current industry, especially in the field of small-scale bioreactor work.

I think I heard about this. Good for her! What'd she get a prize for?