Moderna Co-Founder: Science Cuts Could Lead to “Dystopian Future”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: $3 billion, that is the estimated amount of funds left unspent this past year, after the Trump administration froze or terminated thousands of grants for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Trump’s stance on science has been notably critical in his second term, making inflammatory statements on everything from vaccines to autism. At the same time, the U.S. has experienced growing public health complications, including measles cases surging last year to their highest level in decades. Best known for co-founding the biotech company Moderna, Noubar Afeyan joins Walter Isaacson to discuss why the U.S. should be choosing science.

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Bianna. And Noubar Afeyan, welcome back to the show.

NOUBAR AFEYAN: Great to be back, Walter.

ISAACSON: Every year you write a letter about the miracles that are happening in biotech. And I read yours this year, and it hit me, suddenly, that you had something you are very angry about too. You’d said things you’d not seen in 40 years in biotech. And let me read you what you said. “While we’re closer than ever to realizing biotechnology’s full potential to make miracles, we’re also closer than ever to throwing that potential away. We’re at a risk of taking a sledgehammer to our miracle machine.” What were you, what was, what were you talking about?

AFEYAN: Well, Walter, as you know the biotech industry, the pharmaceutical industry is one of a few science-based industries. That is, that the work that we do as a society to make new findings of mechanisms of disease, new targets, and ultimately new drugs and vaccines, is very much predicated on a robust scientific enterprise, which in this country has operated as a partnership between the government and private sector, and is entirely based on the scientific method. And what we’re seeing in, in the recent past is a level of attack on the output of science and on what the scientific community considers as the most objective facts, based on all the evidence, that is being basically attacked without any countervailing data. And what worries me is that, since that’s such a foundation of this entire biotech enterprise, and broadly the $3.2 trillion of economic value that comes from the medicines enterprise, that we risk to lose what has really been a mainly US based industry. And that worries me because it’s coming at the worst possible time in view of all the opportunities that are coming out with technology and with all the new findings.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s start with those opportunities. You say we’re risking throwing them away, but let’s just do a few in the past year that shows what we were able to do. And one of ’em is an injection that would stop HIV infection, right?

AFEYAN: Yes. And so we’ve seen an injection that on a twice yearly basis can essentially stop HIV from persisting, propagating. And the impact of that on the life of the people involved, not just therapeutically, but from a ability to live with this terrible disease, is just really a life changer. And not only that, but the company, Gilead Sciences – which I don’t have anything to do with, but I’m very proud of as a member of the biotech industry – has also worked with governments to make this available to low to middle-income countries together with the Gates Foundation and others that I think is really taking the miracles and bringing them to as many people as possible. And so that’s a really good example of a scientific idea and discovery going all the way to affecting people’s lives. And we have many, many more.

ISAACSON: Well, one of the other miracles this past year was using what Jennifer Doudna helped create in terms of gene editing, CRISPR technology. There was a kid, KJ, a newborn baby who had a very rare genetic disease. Explain how that is a new frontier too, that we had last year.

AFEYAN: You know, the, we hear a lot about chronic diseases because many people are afflicted with them, which essentially makes what’s called rare genetic diseases, some of them, ultra rare diseases, some of them, there’s 10 people on the planet that have it almost hopeless because there’s no economic case that could be made to develop a treatment for them. But gene editing that allowed us to target – the company that worked on this and the researchers, academic hospital researchers that could basically design a one-off treatment to correct that error, inborn error that then leads to the disease. That is not only a lifesaver for the child who was basically the first case, but also gives hope to many others with other similar errors that can be corrected with the same technology. So it’s this reusability, the programmability of nucleic acid-based medicines that we learned about, you know, a decade or more ago through mRNA, through even SIRNA. Now we’re seeing with gene editing. And again, it gives what seems like a miraculous hope, but in reality it’s been reduced to practice and it’s a man-made, a human-made miracle.

ISAACSON: Okay. Those are the miracles. Now let’s get to the bad news that you’ve talked about. You write, “I fear we are headed for a dystopian future of disease, deprivation and decline.” Is that, let’s go through the factors, is one of ’em the cutting of federal funding for research?

AFEYAN: Well look, since the Vannevar Bush frontiers, kind of, efforts that after World War II established the rationale for federal funding and very generous and growing federal funding that was behind many of the scientific advances – through NSF through NIH over the last decades – we have enjoyed an expansive progressive period where investments by the government, federal government, taxpayer dollars into the advancements in basic, and then applied science, produced the thousands of inventions and advances and papers that then led eventually to practical applications, medicines, vaccines, diagnostics, et cetera. That has been to the benefit of American citizens. And then the whole globe who’s come to depend on essentially that public-private partnership.

What we’re seeing now with a fairly indiscriminate reduction of funding through the NIH and NSF – and I say indiscriminate because it’s not specific to one science project. You might think that’s fair to cut across the board, but actually cutting across the board just means that the enterprise is not valued. And I do think that the notion that we can rely on other people funding basic research and then cherry pick the things that we like to develop in this country, it’s completely not feasible. So yes, I do think that’s one of the ways in which the scientific enterprise is becoming crippled.

ISAACSON: So what’s the, what is happening with the cooperation with universities in the federal government?

AFEYAN: Look, we’ve gone through a period where we’ve had budgets proposed that reduce NIH funding, NSF funding to the tune of 25 to 40%. Fortunately, very recently Congress has pushed back on this and it looks like the full extent of those reductions will not be realized. And I’m glad for that. But the mere suggestion that it should be our policy to dramatically reduce the funding of that type of academic research – and you’re right in pointing out to me that most of what I was just mentioning starts with a significant investment in academic research – that is something that we need to protect. And it’s really kind of sacrosanct in the way the whole downstream process occurs. You cut off the roots and everything else downstream from that will absolutely suffer.

ISAACSON: But is that just the money for the universities? Fellowships are gone, visas are gone, and there seems to be a concerted attack against research universities.

AFEYAN: Look, I don’t understand it, you know, most people who consider themselves world class want to go where world class competition is. And that’s been in the US. The notion that we would exclude, essentially, students from different parts of the world or make it difficult for them, not give them visa appointments, even if they’ve gotten in and they’ve gotten, I mean, this is their life dream. We don’t benefit from those students for just the five years that they do a PhD program. We benefit from them for decades because many, if not most of them want to stay here and contribute productively. So yeah, this is a surprising – in my view – regression. And I’ll say, Walter and I, and I can say this, having experienced it in my life, I view myself as an American by choice. I became an American citizen because I wanted to contribute to this country. This is a country of immigrants. It’s just a question of when people’s ancestry came to this country. And, and we’ve benefited from that because immigrants have been the regenerative force, almost from an evolutionary standpoint. The regenerative force of what I grew up in Lebanon – when I first heard about MIT and about the US and what I heard since in Canada where I grew up – it basically is a melting pot of talent, of ambition, of hope. And that is something that seems to be altered for the first time in a very long time. So I hope that policymakers will see the connection between some of these decisions and how they might affect our competitiveness globally in biotechnology, in science overall, and in technology.

ISAACSON: Well, you just spoke about how you came from Lebanon to go to MIT and have created a great company that brought us things including vaccines and COVID vaccines. But just this past week, President Trump cut off all immigration processing to Lebanon among other countries. How do you feel personally about the country that you came from being cut off?

AFEYAN: I feel terrible about it. I feel terrible about it. I’m worried because as an American by choice, I want every day for the best in the world to make their way here and compete and make us better. I, in my older age – I’ve been doing this for a very long time – in my older age, wanna be the beneficiary of the, the next wave of the Elon Musks or the Sergey Brins or any number of people – the Satya Nadellas – that have come to this country and built a technology industry just to mention some sectors, the academic community. So yeah, I think that we would be frankly kind of hypocritical as immigrant Americans, and citizens not to raise our voice to say, wait a minute, not only this is how we got here, but this is how the parents and the grandparents of the people who are making these decisions got here. So I do think that it’s important to speak up and point out perhaps the unintended consequences of some of these actions because they’re extreme and they are urgent.

ISAACSON: Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr., cut $500 million that was gonna be part of investment in mRNA vaccines. Now, you’ve got a personal stake in that your company, Moderna, even the, I think the RNA part of that company name is because you developed those type of drugs. Tell me what the mRNA vaccines could do and what you think about this cut in funding.

AFEYAN: Well look, going back 15 years in 2010, my, the team that I worked with and then eventually collaborators started wondering whether we could inject the molecule in a human body and, and use it as a factory for any type of therapeutic and then eventually vaccine. And that basic question – that ‘what if we could do this’ – led us to develop a core technology which used the code of life in the form of mRNA.

That big dream led us to spend well over a billion dollars building the technology that the data needed to prove that we could do this and its applications. And one of the areas of application we had worked on in this company, Moderna, for many years before COVID struck, was in vaccines. And in fact, we had collaborated with the NIH, one of the main drivers of the underlying science funding at that time for infectious diseases, including vaccines against multiple flu and RNA based COVID, coronaviruses. When COVID hit, all of that foundation was now put to use in an emergency sense to be able to see if we could rapidly design computationally – and that took less than a day – in a few days, make enough quantities to start testing in animals and then very quickly in humans. And as you know the story, nine months later, the FDA approved after a 30,000 subject trial, more rigorous than any, or many, vaccine trials, an effective vaccine that would lessen the damage done by an infection in a person and certainly reduce hospitalizations as was shown in deaths by over 94%.

Subsequently, there’s been a level of doubt that’s been raised. Again, lots of science is done, lots of new data is generated, but the preponderance of the data has been supportive not only for infectious disease vaccines, but other vaccine types which we’ve tested since. And now much more interestingly, in the cancer vaccine field, in particular, individualized therapies for cancer patients that were showing very exciting and hopeful results.

All of that led hundreds of laboratories to join – from academia and other companies – the fray in trying to use mRNA as a standard set of tools to be able to treat many, many conditions as well vaccines. When the NIH decided that they would stop funding those – frankly much less to the detriment of Moderna, than to all of these academic labs that wanted to make yet new advances with these…and by the way, we also haven’t seen a better vaccine technology that could very rapidly come up with yet another and yet another viable protection for infectious diseases. So that’s the way I see it.

ISAACSON: Let me read you a quote that secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. said, which is, “The idea that you should trust the experts, a good mother doesn’t do that.” What’s your reaction?

AFEYAN: I think that all of us, when it comes to health and in particular the health of our children – and I have four – have the obligation to trust but verify and in particular, trust experts. The verification comes from talking to multiple experts, comes from doing one’s own research, but it does not come from mistaking opinion for fact. And so I view that responsibility fully the job of every parent. I think that every American parent takes this on and every citizen in the world takes us on as best they can. But again, I don’t think that a mistrust of experts is the answer here. I think that one needs to kind of keep an open mind, get the facts, but listen, if we’re not gonna trust doctors who are trained for decades sometimes of their lives and then dedicate their lives to providing a service of helping heal us, helping prevent disease in us, helping catch diseases early so we can act very quickly if we’re gonna doubt them, I don’t know how we’re gonna operate. We will next not trust pilots. We will next not trust any – the po
lice. I mean, honestly, it may sound dramatic, but I just, I think that trust is the basis of coexistence, but bounded by the right to doubt, but in a way that subjects themselves to evidence. This kind of notion that evidence is a luxury can’t be the basis of a modern society, in my view.

ISAACSON: In the year 2000, China had 1% of all biotech patents. Now I think they have 30%. Is what you’ve just been describing, does that mean China may overtake us in biotechnology?

AFEYAN: I think they are overtaking us as we speak, the scale they’ve reached, the rapidity with which they’re acting and the determination, absolutely makes this a real competitive threat. Under normal circumstances, frankly, I’d say bring it on because I trust that our ability to compete back and get even better, and particularly nowadays with AI as a major competitive, I’d say, advantage that we have in incorporating some of these new approaches in completely reforming how science can be done. I’m very excited by the prospects. But if we, in the same time, change the playing field of how science is done in the US and meantime they are marching forward, then I do think that we have a major risk of not only losing our economic security that comes from these activities, but also kind of imperiling a long-term first mover advantage that we have in this sector. And I think it’s very hard to reverse. We’ve seen that in semiconductors. We’ve seen that in, you know, electric vehicles. We’ve seen that in photovoltaic cells and many more areas that I could count. I don’t wanna see it in this area if it could be avoided.

ISAACSON: Noubar Afeyan, thank you so much for joining us again.

AFEYAN: Thank you for the conversation.