What Do mRNA Funding Cuts Mean For Future US Research?

RFK Jr. canceled nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine research funding. Plus, the latest climate news, from flooding in Alaska to new EVs.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Ira Flatow?

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• 1:14Ira Flatow?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flatow. Earlier this week, a lake formed by the melting of Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier threatened to flood one of the state's largest cities, its capital, Juneau. The flood reached a record-breaking crest of nearly 17 feet, and it had the potential to be catastrophic. But you know what? After years of flooding, Juneau was prepared for this one, and their preparations may have saved many homes and lives. Here to discuss this and other climate news of the week is Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review in New York. Casey, welcome back to Science Friday.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Thanks. Always so wonderful to be here.

• 1:56Ira Flatow?

  Tell us about this flood. What happened?

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like you said, this was a pretty big glacial flood in Alaska. This is kind of becoming more common because of climate change. Basically, what happens is as glaciers melt, they often kind of retreat uphill. And they leave behind these glacial lakes, which are, you know, these lakes of glacial meltwater. And they often have walls made of like loose dirt and rock and ice. And those can break, which sends water downhill, sometimes pretty quickly. Since 1990, the number and area and volume of these lakes around the world have all grown by about 50%. So we're seeing more of this as, you know, the climate warms up. Also, like you mentioned, the good news is that this community was pretty prepared for this.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  So while we did see record breaking floods, there was very little damage and very little by way of rescue efforts needed.

• 2:45Ira Flatow?

  When you say it was prepared, what do you mean by that?

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this has become an issue in this area pretty much every year since 2011. They've seen that this glacier causes flooding like this. It has gotten worse in recent years, but the local officials have been able to kind of keep an eye on this lake, you know, use weather data, monitor it closely. So they kind of have a good idea of when this is going to happen. And so the community has installed a lot of flood protections to help. So that there's a lot of HESCO barriers that they put out this year. So those are kind of cloth bags with sand or dirt and reinforced that can help with flood control. And so that's really a big reason why the flooding didn't cause more damage than it did.

• 3:26Ira Flatow?

  And these glacial lakes are increasing in size, right? I mean, all over the world we have them.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So, I mean, the number of these lakes, the size of them, and just how many there are around the world have all been going up since in the last few decades, according to a recent study. So we're going to see more flooding like this around the world because of climate change.

• 3:47Ira Flatow?

  Has Juno thought about creating a dam for the lake?

• 3:50Speaker 03

  There's talk of putting more kind of permanent flood barriers in. You know, these HESCO barriers are a really good kind of temporary solution, but it's a lot of work to put them up and take them down every time. So that's something that they're definitely looking into because it's basically an annual problem at this point.

• 4:07Ira Flatow?

  And covering your wide world of climate change, I know that EVs have been in your sights and they have been a target for the Trump administration. What happened in the last few months? Not good news for EVs.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's been quite the year to be covering electric vehicles, for sure. So what we've seen this year is this pretty dramatic shift in what policy looks like in the US for EVs. So one of the biggest things is people might remember that there are tax credits in place right now, up to $7,500 for people looking to buy new electric vehicles. Those now expire at the end of September. Originally, they were designed to go out, you know, for years. The federal government with new legislation rolled those back. The EPA is proposing a rollback of tailpipe rules. Basically, those are the regulations that makes automakers produce vehicles that don't, you know, produce as much pollution. And so we're just seeing, you know, from regulations to this kind of public support, just a really dramatic reversal,

• 5:06Speaker 03

  a lot of rollbacks and support for these, for electric vehicles in particular.

• 5:11Ira Flatow?

  So EVs are going to lose the tax credit. I guess there's worry that the whole EV market may be in jeopardy.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  There's definitely a lot of worry, and I honestly think we're starting to see the early signs of that. So, you know, when all of these tax credits and supports and regulations were in place last year, some estimates predicted that electric vehicles would make up half of new vehicle sales in the US by 2030. Now, a lot of those estimates are more like 25%, so a pretty dramatic change. And actually, in the second quarter of this year, so from April to June, there were fewer new EVs sold in the US compared to the same period last year. And so in a time where we have pretty much only seen electric vehicle sales growing, that contraction in the US is pretty dramatic.

• 6:01Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, you see in the US, because around the world, they're selling like hotcakes.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Absolutely. China is like right about to hit that 50% mark for electric vehicle sales, which is pretty wild.

• 6:12Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, it is. But despite all of this here, Ford recently doubled down on its EV manufacturing. What's the company working on?

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the the company announced on Monday that they have plans for a new affordable electric truck. The company says that it'll start at around $30,000 and they plan to deliver in 2027. Kind of around that announcement, they they also said they have this new manufacturing process. Basically, they're they're trying to make a shared platform, this set of kind of parts and procedures so that they can make, you know, this truck, other trucks, SUVs, and do it more cheaply and more efficiently.

• 6:47Ira Flatow?

  Now, they they invented, Henry Ford invented the assembly line back in the Model T age. They're reinventing the assembly line, are they not?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're calling it the Assembly Tree. So the idea is that they have a couple of different lines on the floor. So you know, you'll make like the cab and one part, the back of the truck and another part, and then those will kind of come together later on in the factory so that you can, again, kind of make these vehicles more efficiently. The company is saying that this is going to be, you know, something that really helps them with their their EV sales.

• 7:21Ira Flatow?

  And of course, part of EVs, the big, the the big part of EVs, that probably half the value are the batteries. And the batteries are a huge part of the clean energy transition. And you recently reported on a startup that's using earth as a giant battery, right?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:38Ira Flatow?

  Tell me about that, yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  A different, a very different sort of battery. So there's this Texas-based startup called Quidnet that recently showed that it can store energy in the earth for months at a time. And basically, they do this by pumping water underground. One of the most common ways to store electricity today is pumped hydropower, the very old method of storing energy. You know, when electricity is available, you pump water uphill. And then when you want that electricity back, you allow the water to flow downhill and through a turbine to generate the electricity again. This is the same kind of idea, just kind of flipped upside down. So you can just pump water down, and then when you want electricity, you allow it to come back up. It gives you more flexibility of where you would put this sort of equipment.

• 8:20Ira Flatow?

  Wow.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really interesting. The company just completed a six-month test that showed that they were able to store energy for that long and not lose any of it.

• 8:29Ira Flatow?

  And this was really an important amount of energy, not just a few watts?

• 8:33Speaker 03

  It's, it's, I would say, kind of still on the pilot scale, for sure. So they discharged 35 megawatt hours of energy. That would be, you know, about 1,000 households' worth of electricity for a day. You know, really big battery storage facilities are, you know, tens or hundreds of times bigger than this. But for a pilot phase, it's pretty interesting. One big caveat is that they still need to build all of the equipment to turn that pressurized water back into electricity. That should come online in early 2026.

• 9:05Ira Flatow?

  Details, details. So it could be scalable, but right, right now, it's not replacing those old batteries.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, when it comes to energy storage, I think the more solutions, the better. There will be, you know, kind of, maybe batteries will work for one kind of area or one application, and this might work somewhere else. It's not going to replace batteries by any means.

• 9:30Ira Flatow?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of batteries, I understand that New York City is testing portable home batteries during these hot summer months for air conditioners? Can that work? What's going on here?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so folks, you know, in New York or wherever you are, might get a text from, you know, your utility on these hot days, saying, hey, can you turn your air conditioner down? And so to help this, there's this new pilot program called Responsible Grid, where basically what they're doing is giving residents a small battery about the size of a microwave that they can plug their AC unit into. And the company controls this kind of remotely via software. And so when demand is really high on the grid, and it's really stressed, and we're really working at our limits, you can run your AC off the battery instead. And you can get paid to do it. Right now, it's a really small program, but this kind of idea of trying to shave off demand at those really high peaks is getting really popular. And there's, I would say, a growing number of programs trying to do things like this.

• 10:26Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, it sounds like a sort of a take on people who have solar panels and charge their battery up and then become part of the grid. This is a little different.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And this kind of, whether it's like that, like solar panels and the batteries, or this kind of program, this kind of distributed model is really interesting because, you know, we could put these big batteries, whether it's, you know, the earth battery or more typical battery storage solutions on the grid. But it can take a long time to build those. It can take a long time to get permits. So this is kind of a way to get around that. You can, you know, do a lot of these little projects instead.

• 11:00Ira Flatow?

  Before we go, I want to talk about nuclear power. We know that France really has lots of nuclear power plants. But a plant in France was shut down by a swarm of jellyfish.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yes, this was, this is a pretty wild story this week. So a major nuclear plant in France had to shut down. They had four reactors shut down between Sunday night and Monday morning after jellyfish appeared in their cooling system. So a lot of nuclear power plants will use either like seawater or water from a river to help cool down the reactors. And in this case, it seems like the jellyfish kind of got by the screens that are designed to keep, you know, animals from ending up in these facilities. And so these reactors all had to shut down.

• 11:45Ira Flatow?

  Oh, so this is not some out of a movie thing. We had these, the attack of the giant jellyfish, right?

• 11:52Speaker 03

  No, no, no worries about them being like radioactive or anything. It's in the non-nuclear part of the facility.

• 11:59Ira Flatow?

  And why did this happen now?

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's a little tough to say. But one thing that we do know is that higher temperatures, higher ocean temperatures can be associated with more jellyfish. Overfishing also can lead to more jellyfish because, you know, not as many predators. And so we've seen, you know, record breaking heat waves this year again, especially in Europe. And so some experts say that, you know, because of climate change, we might be seeing more jellyfish and could lead to more, more problems like this.

• 12:28Ira Flatow?

  Well, we've always heard stories about how fish like to congregate where the water comes out of a power plant because it's a lot warmer. Maybe this is a sort of a case of that.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's, it's really interesting how the, the nuclear power plant kind of becomes part of the ecosystem almost. I think it's really fascinating.

• 12:46Ira Flatow?

  Well, you've always been fascinating for us, Casey. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 12:53Ira Flatow?

  Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review in New York.

• 13:02Ira Flatow?

  We have to take a break, and when we come back, what the HHS decision to pull back on mRNA vaccine research means for science. Stay with us.

• 13:16Speaker 00

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• 15:32Ira Flatow?

  Last week, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Department of Health and Human Services would terminate almost $500 million in mRNA vaccine development grants and contracts. Here to explain what this means for mRNA research beyond those immediate grants is Dr. Jeff Koller, professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He's studied mRNA for more than 30 years. Welcome to Science Friday.

• 16:03Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 16:04Ira Flatow?

  You and your team's discoveries contributed to Moderna's mRNA vaccine. What was your reaction to last week's announcement?

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I was completely baffled and really thought it was probably one of the most reckless decisions I've seen come from the HHS. You know, this technology has literally saved millions of people's lives and has such tremendous potential to revolutionize medicine. Most scientists like me and others appreciate the power of the mRNA medicine platform and what it's able to do, not only for infectious disease, but for cancer and rare disease. It was shocking to me that a decision could be made that was clearly based on political motivations and not based on hard science.

• 16:53Ira Flatow?

  So, the promise of mRNA technology is what?

• 16:58Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, there's a lot here, okay? Let's talk a little bit about what mRNA is. So, in your cell, you have DNA. That's your genes. That contains all the genetic information that makes you you. And in order to express those genes, you have to transmit information. So if you think about your genes as like a restaurant, there are individual recipes that have to be made. And each mRNA is like a recipe card that's telling your cell how to make a particular recipe. So with the mRNA technology, we've really tapped into this fundamental, natural process that occurs in your body. Your body makes MRNAs all the time and is using it to make very specific instructions, very specific recipes. And so-

• 17:44Speaker 05

  We are using that tool to do all kinds of things. So it's very powerful in vaccine development for infectious disease, but it's also being investigated for the treatment of debilitating cancers like pancreatic cancer, and glioblastoma, and triple negative breast cancer, as well as the treatment of ultra rare and rare genetic disorders like muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis. So by limiting the use of this technology in the United States, we're really hindering our ability to do these sort of medical miracles, really, that all scientists and physicians are really seeing as potentially lifesaving and life-changing over the next two or three decades.

• 18:26Ira Flatow?

  I know that last week's announcement impacts 22 existing mRNA vaccine development projects from universities, biotech companies, pharma, Pfizer, Moderna. Will this have much of an effect on mRNA research beyond those projects?

• 18:43Speaker 05

  Oh, sure. I mean, it's not so much about the money. It's the, you know, the action of what was done. It really was a shot across the bow, a warning from the federal government that, you know, this is a technology that we don't appreciate and that we don't want in the United States. And if you're an academic institution who has to write a grant, that would have to be approved by the NIH. Or if you're a company that's developing a drug, that would have to be approved by the FDA, all of which is under the general auspices of the HHS, you're going to wonder, are they going to, you know, continue to support this activity? You know, companies need money to develop drugs. Drugs are expensive. And so they rely upon venture capital and other sources of income.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  And if those are just not available because people are skittish about the technology, then those activities will be moved outside of the United States.

• 19:36Ira Flatow?

  Does this change in attitude by HHS mean that if there is some new pandemic that starts to develop around the world, that we would have to rely on Europe to create a new mRNA vaccine for us? And it would not be available here?

• 19:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the fact is, is that, you know, many medical professionals state that it's not a question of if bird flu, for example, goes pandemic. It's more of a question of when. It could be five years, it could be 10 years. But it's highly likely that it will eventually go pandemic. And The consequences of that, of course, are huge. And so we have to be ready to respond from a national security standpoint. And if we have to rely upon foreign countries to produce vaccines for us, what sort of risk does that put us in from a country? And it's not just Europe that's doubling down on this technology. It's China and China is probably going to be the world leader very soon,

• 20:35Speaker 05

  not only in mRNA research, but in biotechnology in general. And it wouldn't be unheard of that in two, three years' time, your vaccines will have made in China label.

• 20:47Ira Flatow?

  But my question is also about would even if you had the vaccine made in China and FDA does not like approval of that kind of vaccine, it would not possibly be available here?

• 20:57Speaker 05

  That's correct. Hundred percent.

• 20:59Ira Flatow?

  Wow. Any of this scare you at all?

• 21:03Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, it totally scares me from a security standpoint is that, again, this is a technology that is highly effective. And the COVID vaccines were some of the safest and most efficacious vaccines that were ever rolled out. And so to have that power at our hands for a response to the next pandemic and to not use it is, it's not just scary, it's also irresponsible. But that goes beyond infectious disease as well, because we're using this technology for other important indications like pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer has about a 95% death rate. And there's a study that came out in 2020. When they injected that mRNA into those patients, 50% of the patients responded.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  That's incredible to have a technology that might be a cure for pancreatic cancer. And it's not just that, it's rare diseases as well. I mean, I hope that people realize that scientists like myself, we work for the American people because we're paid by American taxpayer dollars. And we give back by trying to improve the lives of everyone every day. And we need to continue to invest into that. So I mean, I really hope that we'll rise above this moment and realize that we all want the best for our families.

• 22:19Ira Flatow?

  Well, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today.

• 22:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you.

• 22:24Ira Flatow?

  Dr. Jeff Koller, professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University.

• 22:34Ira Flatow?

  Hey, thanks for listening. This episode was produced by Charles Berkowitz and Dee Peterschmidt. And a lot of people helped make this show happen. Sandy Roberts.

• 22:44Speaker 05

  Robin Kazmer.

• 22:46Ira Flatow?

  Fraser Gucci. George Harper. See you next time. I'm Ira Flatow.