Noubar Afeyan: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you well know, some of the early papers on mRNA vaccines — they were rejected repeatedly at academic journals. Katalin Karikó had trouble in her academic career. Now she’s highly likely to win a Nobel Prize. What’s wrong with academia? And how do we fix it? I’ll just say, Tyler, that is true generally. In their particular case, it was really more about pretty basic mRNA modifications as opposed to vaccines because back 20 years ago, people weren’t working on vaccines. They were just working on being able to show that mRNA could even get into a human cell. People were quite resistant to believing that was possible. Look, the scientific method, the scientific community — it works on advances that are predicated on current and prior advances. Incremental advances are the coin of the realm. It’s not that they’re conservative. It’s just that the process, the communal process of accepting truth as that which can’t be negated, causes you to therefore be, in every which way, questioning everything. I learned long ago the expression organized skepticism. That’s what science is predicated on. As a result, if you come forward with something that is not fully supported by and connected to the current reality, people don’t know what to do with it. What many academic scientists do is to spend the next 5, 10 years putting the connections in place to make what’s being proposed a natural extension of what existed before. In industry, we don’t have that need, and the reason Moderna was able to really be the pioneer in the space of establishing a therapeutic platform, even before a vaccine platform, is because for us, the lack of connection between what we were able to do and what had been done before was marginally interesting, but we weren’t trying to publish it. When you patent something, you don’t have to show that it’s a natural extension of what people did. You just have to describe something that is novel, that is unobvious. In fact, the less connected, the more unobvious, and/or the less connectible. My answer to your question would be, a lot of it has to do with the essence of academic, scientific pursuit of knowledge, which causes this collectivism, and it has its disadvantages. One of them is, if you don’t have all the pieces together, people will be skeptical. How should we improve the biomedical funding cycle?…

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