Moderna co-founder Robert Langer on mRNA vaccines & the fragility of expert class...
Is mRNA an untested new tech that isn't safe? No. Media forces experts to reduce their nuanced thinking to 30sec clips. This reduces the quality of scientific discourse and makes experts more fragile.
Last week we released our interview with Robert Langer, co-founder of Moderna and the most cited engineer in history. He is one of 10 Institute Professors at MIT, which is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member; his lab at MIT is the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world; and his inventions are estimated to have affected over 2 billion lives.
We chatted about his early career struggles as a freshly minted graduate student, his groundbreaking postdoc research on blood vessel growth that few believed could become reality, the future of drug delivery and tissue engineering technology, why the mRNA vaccine is safe and has withstood the test of time, the success of Langer Lab in spurring dozens of biotech companies, and the future of medicine amongst many other topics. Check it out here.
How does the Covid vaccine and mRNA technology work?
One part of the interview I’d like to highlight is our discussion on the Covid vaccine, since Prof. Langer and Moderna have been spearheading its research.
Prof. Langer attributes two reasons to the amazing speed of the mRNA vaccine development process:
the superior nature of the technology itself in comparison to previous vaccination technologies;
the U.S. government’s “Operation Warp Speed” that invested a lot of capital into the private sector while providing regulatory support.
Q: It is claimed that Moderna had designed the vaccine in just two days. For context, the vaccine development process typically takes at least a full year. In this case, both Moderna and Pfizer sped up the process by relying on mRNA vaccines, which essentially deliver instructions to the body on what type of antibodies it should make. Could you begin by breaking down the science behind the mRNA vaccine?
A: The central dogma is: DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes protein. So classically what people did for vaccines were focusing on the protein part, usually using inactivated viruses or growing up eggs that could make the protein and so forth.
What Moderna did is it started with the messenger RNA. When you do the virus work or grow the eggs, it may take a very, very long time to grow up enough to make the vaccine. The beauty of mRNA is you could make the mRNA very quickly and give it to the body. After injection, the body is actually your factory. In that way, you could make the vaccine extremely quickly and start testing it.
Another key pillar of the vaccine technology is drug delivery. To a patient, the mRNA would get destroyed immediately, so it has to be done by being encapsulated in nanoparticles. In this case, you shoot the nanoparticle with the messenger RNA into the patient; the nanoparticles protect the mRNA, which goes into the muscle before coming out and allowing the body to start making the protein. And then the body will start making antibodies to that protein, and if it makes enough, then one is immunized.
Usually you get two shots because the first one starts the antibody production, but when you give the second shot you make even more antibodies. Sometimes you may need a booster shot too depending on the situation because over time the antibodies may wane.
Is mRNA safe? Is it an untested new technology?
Q: Due to the accelerated timeline, much of the public is skeptical about the mRNA technology. It is often perceived by many as this scary, untested new technology that would somehow alter human bodies forever in ways we don’t yet fully understand. Is this a fairly new technology? We previously had zero approved mRNA product, right?
A: Well, yes and no… This Covid vaccine was actually the 9th mRNA vaccine that went into the clinic. Moderna had been working on many other mRNA vaccines and treatments long before Covid; it’s just they had been going through a slower process of clinical tests and FDA approvals. So it wasn’t like there’s no science or no human clinical trials for the mRNA technology.
In a way, the Covid vaccine leapfrogged over all those others just because of the speed of FDA approval and previous funding that the government put into it. Whereas the others went through more standard processes, even though I think it's faster than what we’d ever done before.
In other words, the mRNA technology, therefore contrary to what many have incorrectly said, is a mature technology that we should feel safe about.
The best anti-mRNA argument out there…?
Maybe a few decades ago when vaccines first came out and caused a decent number of deaths, it was somewhat justified for anti-vaxxers to raise concerns, but these days it’s pretty much impossible to come up with any sound argument and evidence against the clear positive impacts of vaccines. Science has prevailed quite resoundingly.
But I think we can still find small pockets of disagreements, not in the substance of science itself per se, but often in the way that science is being conveyed. Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who is a prominent figure in the Intellectual Dark Web community, made this argument during a Clubhouse session:
The vaccine isn’t safe, but it also doesn’t do harm. I say this because there’s no way we can truly understand the possible long-term impacts of this new technology within a year of development, though this shouldn’t be the reason why one shouldn’t be willing to be vaccinated. Given the tremendous economic and healthcare cost, we should still get people vaccinated, but this doesn’t mean the mRNA vaccine is 100% safe.
However, the issue with today’s scientific and policymaking community is that they have to be so condescending in telling the rest of the public that anyone who questions the vaccine to the slightest degree is immediately a conspiracy theorist or ignoramus. I don’t want them to wrap their hands around my throat and tell me what kind of questions I can or cannot ask.
In other words, Weinstein finds issues with the way that scientific knowledge and innovations are being conveyed to the public in a paternalistic manner, and the result is that it further fuels conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccine activists.
We see the same line of argument being made for climate change debates as well: “sure, I agree that human actions caused climate change and we need to do something about it, but it is still wrong for policymakers and scientists to come out and say that they’re 100% sure about the science behind climate change. Arriving at such absolute certainty just for the purpose of advancing some agenda that you think is contributing to progress is just irresponsible, even though I may agree with your end goal of solving climate change…”
The staunch supporters of mRNA & climate change see people like Bret Weinstein as unnecessarily nitpicking irrelavant details as evidence for the failure of science and making unhelpful arguments, while Weinstein’s supporters see the other side as paternalistic, condescending establishment technocrats who have politicized science…
You can kind of see how all this is a somewhat meaningless debate. Both sides are right in their respective ways and are both making fairly nuanced arguments, but they are also seeing the worst of each other and cannot come together because the discourse has become too extreme with very low tolerance for nuance and error.
Dr. Fauci can never be right in today’s media landscape…
You probably remember that at the beginning of Covid, Dr. Fauci said on 60 Minutes that people shouldn’t be concerned about wearing masks and doing so could actually lead to more infections because you’re more likely to touch your face, and that clip was later put on repeat by every anti-Fauci, anti-science media outlet as the “gotcha” moment of Fauci downplaying Covid and showing conflicting narrative?
Science is complex, and using a one-minute interview clip to judge the quality of a scientist’s work is an inherently faulty mechanism. This is why I think the attacks on Dr. Fauci and other scientists have largely been unjustified.
It’s not really scientists’ fault that in today’s media landscape, scientific messages are reduced to 20-second video clips and short social media posts. We don’t know Dr. Fauci’s full logic or reasoning; we just know he said these punchlines that CNN or NYTimes showed us… It’s not that these quick lines aren’t factual; they just certainly don’t represent the full picture. And because they’re presented to us as “facts,” we don’t feel the need to dive into the details behind any further.
Science is made of facts; it’s not some narrative. So if you put Joe Rogan in a room with Robert Langer, Rogan’s skepticism about how “mRNA is this new untested technology that we just don’t know enough about” would get destroyed by Langer in 30 seconds… This is why we should listen to actual experts explaining science, and not just anybody who can make arguments that sound clever or logical at first glance.
But I see a greater issue here: because we emphasize the “fact” part of science so much, we often forget how complex these facts could be, and we don’t tolerate scientists to be uncertain.
This is the dramatic reductionism of scientific discourse to mere facts… This is a self-fulfilling race to the bottom: The experts feel obligated to adjust to today’s media landscape by giving shorter facts rather than revealing the full complexity of the issue, which inherently reduces the quality of their reasoning and argument, and this also gives them less room of error. They’re no longer judged by the full spectrum of their logic and deliberation, but by the 1-2 sentences that CNN/Fox puts on repeat.
The fragility of our expert class
The expert class has become very fragile. In this environment, any hesitation or update of beliefs are refracted to the public as incompetence and incoherence. We gradually forget that scientists don’t have everything figured out immediately, and that they also struggle through various challenges as they update their knowledge.
But not making any mistake is impossible by construction, and I don’t want to live in a world where scientists never feel safe admitting their errors.
It is quite an amazing experience being able to interview someone like Robert Langer for 90 minutes – it gave me a glimpse to how nuanced his thinking is and how deeply he has thought about many of these issues. But very unfortunately, only a tiny fraction is aired out to the public, and very few medium besides long-form podcasting have the ability to convey the full logic and subtleties of Langer’s thinking. This is why I’m a big fan of podcast, and a big pessimist on the social effects of legacy and social media.
Misinformation is an issue, but it arguably wouldn’t have been as big of an issue as it is today if the expert class hadn’t become so fragile – not because of their own doing but because of the socio-political forces at play… The society should have some level of defense against things like QAnon, but we see even highly educated people pointing to Dr. Fauci’s “conflicting remarks” as reason to lose faith in science altogether.
I think the fundamental cause to this great tragedy is not conspiracy theories and misinformation, but rather secular forces like the shortening and lack of nuance in today’s discourse, from culture to science, from policymaking to academia.
Media is the central piece of the puzzle because it is how information is filtered and disseminated to the public. What most media platforms are doing to the experts today is “dimension reduction” – stripping away their nuances for more views. How much information do we lose in the process? Probably a lot. How much damage does this do to our society? Probably a lot…
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