What Do mRNA Funding Cuts Mean For Future US Research?

[AUDIO LOGO]

IRA 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.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks. Always so wonderful to be here.

IRA FLATOW: Tell us about this flood. What happened?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah. So like you said, this was a pretty big glacial flood in Alaska. This is of becoming more common because of climate change. Basically, what happens is, as glaciers melt, they often retreat uphill. And they leave behind these glacial lakes, which are these lakes of glacial meltwater. And they often have walls made of 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 the climate warms up. Also, like you mentioned, the good news is that this community was pretty prepared for this. So while we did see record-breaking floods, there was very little damage and very little by way of rescue efforts needed.

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

CASEY CROWNHART: 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 keep an eye on this lake, use weather data, monitor it closely.

So they 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 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.

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

CASEY CROWNHART: 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 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.

IRA FLATOW: Has Juneau thought about creating a dam for the lake?

CASEY CROWNHART: There’s talk of putting more permanent flood barriers in. These Hesco barriers are a really good 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.

IRA FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And covereing 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.

CASEY CROWNHART: 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 for years. The federal government, with new legislation, rolled those back.

The EPA is proposing a rollback of tailpipe rules. Basically, those are the regulation that makes automakers produce vehicles that don’t produce as much pollution. And so we’re just seeing, from regulations to this public support, just a really dramatic reversal, a lot of rollbacks and support for electric vehicles in particular.

IRA FLATOW: Mm-hmm. So EVs are going to lose the tax credit. I guess there’s worry that the whole EV market may be in jeopardy.

CASEY CROWNHART: There’s definitely a lot of worry. And I honestly think we’re starting to see the early signs of that. So 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.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. You say, in the US, because around the world, they’re selling like hotcakes.

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

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

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so 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. Around that announcement, they also said they have this new manufacturing process. Basically, they’re trying to make a shared platform, this set of parts and procedures so that they can make this truck, other trucks, SUVs, and do it more cheaply and more efficiently.

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

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, they’re calling it the assembly tree. So the idea is that they have a couple of different lines on the floor. So make the cab in one part, the back of the truck in another part. And then those will come together later on in the factory so that you can, again, make these vehicles more efficiently. The company is saying that this is going to be something that really helps them with their EV sales.

IRA FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And of course, part of EVs, the big part of EVs or 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?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: Tell me about that. Yeah.

CASEY CROWNHART: 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. It’s a very old method of storing energy. 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 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.

IRA FLATOW: Wow.

CASEY CROWNHART: 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.

IRA FLATOW: And this was really an important amount of energy, not just a few Watts?

CASEY CROWNHART: I would say, it’s still on the pilot scale, for sure. So they discharged 35 megawatt hours of energy. That would be about 1,000 household’s worth of electricity for a day. Really big battery storage facilities are 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.

IRA FLATOW: Details, details. So it could be scalable. But right now, it’s not replacing those old batteries.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, absolutely. I think that when it comes to energy storage, I think the more solutions, the better. Maybe batteries will work for one area or one application, and this might work somewhere else. It’s not going to replace batteries, by any means.

IRA 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?

CASEY CROWNHART: Mm-hmm.

IRA FLATOW: What’s going on here?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah. So, folks in New York or wherever you are might get a text from 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 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.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, it sounds like 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.

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. And 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 we could put these big batteries, whether it’s 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 a way to get around that. You can do a lot of these little projects instead.

IRA 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.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes. This was 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 seawater or water from a river to help cool down the reactors. And in this case, it seems like the jellyfish got by the screens that are designed to keep animals from ending up in these facilities. And so these reactors all had to shut down.

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

CASEY CROWNHART: [LAUGHS] No, no. No worries about them being radioactive or anything. It’s in the non-nuclear part of the facility.

IRA FLATOW: And why did this happen now?

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

IRA 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 sort of a case of that.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah it’s really interesting how the nuclear power plant becomes part of the ecosystem, almost. I think it’s really fascinating.

IRA FLATOW: Well, you’ve always been fascinating for us, Casey. Thank you–

CASEY CROWNHART: [LAUGHS]

IRA FLATOW: –for taking time to be with us today.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks so much for having me.

IRA FLATOW: Casey Crownhart, Senior Climate Reporter for MIT Technology Review in New York.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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.

[AUDIO LOGO]

IRA 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 Coller, 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.

JEFF COLLER: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: You and your team’s discoveries contributed to Moderna’s mRNA vaccine. What was your reaction to last week’s announcement?

JEFF COLLER: Well, I was completely baffled and really thought it was probably one of the most reckless decisions I’ve seen come from the HHS. 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.

IRA FLATOW: So the promise of mRNA technology is what?

JEFF COLLER: Well, I mean, there’s a lot here, OK? 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 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 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 life-saving and life-changing over the next two or three decades.

IRA FLATOW: Hmm. And 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?

JEFF COLLER: Oh, sure. I mean, it’s not so much about the money. It’s the action of what was done. It really was a shot across the bow, a warning from the federal government that 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 continue to support this activity?

Companies need money to develop drugs. Drugs are expensive. And so they rely upon venture capital and other sources of income. 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.

IRA 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?

JEFF COLLER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the fact is that 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, not only in mRNA research, but in biotechnology in general. And it wouldn’t be unheard of that in two or three years time, your vaccines will have a Made in China label.

IRA FLATOW: But my question is also about, 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.

JEFF COLLER: That’s correct, 100%.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Any of this scare you at all?

JEFF COLLER: 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 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. 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.

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

JEFF COLLER: Yeah, thank you, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Jeff Coller, Professor of RNA Biology and Therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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

SANDY ROBERTS: Sandy Roberts.

ROBIN KAZMIER: Robin Kazmier.

PRAISE AGOCHI: Praise Agochi.

GEORGE HARPER: George Harper.

IRA FLATOW: See you next time. I’m Ira Flatow.

Copyright © 2025 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/