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.

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.

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What it takes for tenure
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.