Coffee Break: Climate, Eugenics, and a Note on mRNA Vaccines

Part the First: Climate, “What, Me Worry?”  Once again Alfred E. Neuman comes to mind as “policy-based science” remains the order of the day in the Current Administration as Trump Administration Plans to Break Up Premier Weather and Climate Research Center.

The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.

The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.

But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and said that the federal government would be “breaking up” the institution.

Mr. Vought wrote that a “comprehensive review is underway” and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.” (unlikely)

We often hear that “It’s just the weather.”  Well, we experience climate as weather.  But climate comes first.

Mr. Trump routinely mocks climate change as a hoax and his administration has labeled virtually all efforts to study climate change, reduce the level of dangerous greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or protect communities from the impacts of global warming as “alarmism.”

The administration said the center had supported what it called frivolous and ideological issues, such as research on how to protect wind turbines from hurricanes and a project to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into studies of how climate change would affect coastal communities.

Yes, well, mockery is what he does.  Nothing new there.  And nothing new here:

Putting the facility on the chopping block would also be an economic blow to Colorado. President Trump has feuded with Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, in recent days, calling him a “weak and pathetic man” and accusing the governor with no evidence of being “run” by Venezuelan gang members.

The dispute stems from the case of a former state election official in Colorado, Tina Peters, who was convicted of multiple felonies after she gave Mr. Trump’s supporters unauthorized access to voting machines after the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Trump has pardoned Ms. Peters, but Colorado officials have countered that presidential pardons do not apply to state crimes. (IANAL but Mr. Childs, my 8^th-grade Civics teacher would agree.)

Are we nearing, or have we passed certain climate tipping points because we have added carbon to the atmosphere over the past two hundred years that was sequestered over a two hundred million years?  Is it “just weather” that the warmest years since the beginning of the nineteenth century are concentrated in the last thirty of those years.  Perhaps we should ask Mr. Vought because soon we will not be able to ask the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): “This website is an ARCHIVED version of NOAA Climate.gov as of June 25, 2025.  Content is not being updated or maintained, and some links may no longer work.”

Part the Second: American Science Shattered, Part 9.  The National Human Genome Research Institute has been at the forefront of genome biology since before the first complete genome of anything but a few viruses had been completed.  James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix with Francis Crick, was the first director of the precursor NHGRI precursor, the National Center for Human Genome Research. We have forgotten how new “genome” research is.  Watson lived a long life.  How NHGRI should respond when he died last month had been an issue for years:

Tucked away on a government server were drafts of opinion pieces, talking points its scientists could make in interviews, and a statement from the agency’s director. This elaborate PR campaign was prepared for two reasons: Watson had been a powerful advocate for the Human Genome Project and its first director, and was, quite literally, the reason NHGRI existed. But Watson’s unrepentant beliefs in scientific racism and sexism, which had poisoned his own legacy, wouldn’t die with him. If anything, they were making a comeback.

Even before President Trump’s return to power illuminated a new wave of racist, anti-immigrant, transphobic sentiments, eugenic ideas and rhetoric had been ramping up in the U.S., driven by anxieties about low birth rates and the arrival of genetic technologies that promise prospective parents new powers of offspring “optimization.” Amid this resurgence, NHGRI’s leadership had taken a public stance against scientific racism and eugenics — driven by the technologies’ dubious evidence and ethics, and their potential to discourage historically marginalized groups from participating in genomics research, threatening the future of personalized medicine.

But when Watson died in November at age 97, NHGRI did not put out any of the materials Bates and her team had prepared. There was no one left in its communication office to do that. Bates and everyone who had worked there, along with the entirety of NHGRI’s education and outreach offices, had been fired months before as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to restructure the federal government.

Is this important?  Yes.  The public face of NIH is how scientists and non-scientists gain access to the biological and biomedical knowledge that has accumulated since the 1950s, virtually all of it paid for by the American taxpayer.  When PubMed went down briefly a few months ago, my first thought was “this is the end.”  Turned out it was a temporary glitch, but it is not unreasonable to expect the glitch at some time in the near future to become permanent for PubMed and the various genome databases without which modern biomedical science would grind to an immediate halt:

These losses have garnered little attention compared to grant terminations, purges of advisory bodies, crackdowns on international collaborations, and other actions taken by the Trump administration over the past 11 months to impose conservative political views on the U.S. research enterprise. But given the current crisis in public trust in both government and in science, no less troubling is the tearing down of the very tools best suited to address it: namely, clear and frequent communication.

Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon did not answer detailed questions from STAT about reduced public communications and the centralization at the NIH, but issued a statement saying the agency “is modernizing the largest website footprint in HHS, building on long-standing work and using a structure that supports consistent improvement across the agency.” Recent investments and engagement across the NIH “have strengthened the foundation for a more unified and efficient web presence, creating momentum for enterprise-wide updates,” he added.

Nice words.  Not true.  What is in the data and the information that must be hidden.  Or lost?

Perhaps the best place to understand what is being lost, and what’s at stake, is at the genome institute. A congressional mandate to communicate with the public is uniquely written into its founding charter, an obligation it fulfilled through its designated education and community involvement branch. It’s also the only institute dedicated not to an organ or a disease, but to a molecule. And not just any molecule, but one suffused with the entire history of all the humans that have ever lived on planet Earth and all the potential futures for the generations of humans still to come. The study of DNA can thus never simply be about the genes someone inherits, but must include the stories societies tell about the meaning of that inheritance.

For centuries, scientists have been hypnotized by the questions of how, and why, humans differ. The Human Genome Project, by deciphering the sequence of genetic “letters” in our DNA a quarter century ago, promised to provide some answers, and in so doing root out the genetic causes of disease and improve the health of all humans. But over the last decade and a half, modern geneticists have had to confront the possibility that their work, rather than finally interring the myth of race as a biological category, has instead perpetuated it, and even added fuel to the resurging fires of scientific racism.

It is easy to believe that eugenics has disappeared as a scientific proposition.  But this is not true.  Kathryn Paige Harden of the University of Texas published The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (2022). It is an interesting book, more sophisticated and not as “in your face” as an overt political tract as The Bell Curve (1994) by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, but it can be read in the same way.  And it has been.  For those who want to dig deeper, The Genetic Lottery was reviewed in NYRB by M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin.  The inevitable exchange of views appeared a few weeks later.  Feldman and Riskin won the debate.  From Professor Harden: “One’s genetics might not determine your life outcomes, but they are still associated, among other things, with being hundreds of thousands of dollars wealthier at the end of one’s working life.”  No.  It is much more likely personal wealth at the end of “one’s working life”. will be associated with the parents one chose before birth, or something else just as stochastic.  Genius is seldom involved.

But this kind of thing is not only a seemingly recondite matter for the academy:

While railing against immigration on a conservative talk radio show last year, Trump falsely claimed that the Biden administration had admitted 13,000 migrants convicted of homicide. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” he went on. “And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” At a rally in 2023, he said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In 2020 while visiting the town of Bemidji, Minn., a city that’s 80% white, Trump told the crowd that they had “good genes.” “A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” he said. “The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different?” (I suppose it is beyond the President Trump’s ken that thoroughbred horses are inbred to the point of breakdown?)

The president’s language underscores a larger movement of eugenic ideas back toward the mainstream. Another place they’re showing up is in the emergence of a new technology that claims to give parents more informed choices about what kinds of children to have. Which makes now a particularly fraught moment for NHGRI to lose its voice.

These days rich people believe they can pre-screen their embryos for polygenic traits that will ensure the success of their offspring.  This is all the rage in Silicon Valley.  It will not work.  Earlier today while waiting for my third Zoom meeting to begin, I read an article by the great Robert Lipsyte that illustrates our culture adrift, A Farewell to Sports:

In the year I was born, 1938, the White Christian males who ruled the sports world considered their various games and pastimes as definers of righteousness, crucibles of character, and a preparation for dominance in business and war. Anyone who played but didn’t look like them was an interloper, clearly operating with some kind of performance enhancers.

That was made clear in a book published that very year by one of the premier sportswriters of his time, Paul Gallico. It was called Farewell to Sport and in it he declaimed that the “colored brother” was so good at boxing because he “is not nearly so sensible to pain as his White brother. He has a thick, hard skull and good hands”; that New York Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, “like all people who spring from what we call low origins… never had any inhibitions”; and that the reason basketball “appeals to the Hebrew… is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart aleckness.”

I was particularly struck by his observation that Mildred (Babe) Didrikson Zaharias became one of the greatest athletes of the century (and in so many sports!) “simply because she would not or could not compete with women at their own best game — man-snatching. It was an escape, a compensation. She would beat them at everything else they tried to do.”

The backstory to that observation holds a key to the more general misogyny in sports then, if not in society in general. During a friendly golf game, Gallico and Zaharias were talked into a footrace by the famous sportswriter Grantland Rice. The Babe ran Paul into the ground and he rarely wrote about her again without mentioning her muscles, Adam’s apple, and loud voice. After all, how could a real woman beat a real man? (One of the best sports biographies I have ever read is Wonder Girl)

Been there, done that in living memory, Mr. President, BS (Penn); Jay Bhattacharya, MD-MS-PhD (Stanford); and RFKJr, BA-MA-JD (Harvard, LSE, UVA, Pace).  We do not need to go back, and you will ultimately fail if you persist.  But the damage will be long-lasting.  The Second Law, from which there is no escape, tells us that tearing down is a lot easier than building up, and keeping up.

Part the Third: A Reply to ambrit and Others About mRNA Vaccines.  Last week during the Coffee Break we discussed mRNA vaccines that work against pancreatic cancer.  ambrit asked this and others responded:

On the mRNA front, there is an ongoing fracas concerning the Covid-19 mRNA shots. Does this controversy center around the mRNA “method” itself or the coronavirus spike proteins used in the “vaccines?”

The new “in the patient’s body” method sounds like it could easily transform into a system for promoting epigenetic changes in the young.

Good questions!  While I have read much about mRNA vaccines since the first year of COVID-19, I am by no means an expert on the subject.  So what follows is based on this reading plus intuition based on a long laboratory working life that began long before mRNA could be a “reagent.”

The technique for introducing an exogenous mRNA into cultured mammalian cells for synthesis of its cognate protein was introduced in 1989.  The paper was “electric” and hundreds of thousands of papers have been published using this general technique.  Dr. Robert Malone of ACIP was first author on that paper and this is apparently why he has spent much of the past five years claiming to be the inventor of mRNA vaccines.  No, actually.  But the technique itself was revolutionary.  And in theory, using mRNA to produce an antigen in the body of the subject is the rapid response to an emerging infectious disease in the Genomic Era.  However, to my knowledge this did not work for Zika virus after that outbreak ten years ago.  Still, the idea that an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 was irresistible – “sexy” – as molecular biologists say in the lab and seminar room (and in the boardrooms at Moderna and Pfizer, lucrative!).  How could this not work!  This idea is too beautiful to fail!

Even though there was nothing experimental in the technique, which was sophisticated and led to this Nobel Prize (a story that is yet to be written from the correct perspective), these vaccines were an experiment.  This was never emphasized by the medical and political establishments.  One problem was that no one knew how much spike protein would be produced in each person who received the mRNA vaccine or whether it was a good idea for a viral protein fragment to be produced in the inoculated rather than given in a vaccination.  In my research experience, expression of a foreign protein often makes cells sick.  And a viral fusion protein is very foreign, unlike the cancer neoantigens that are used in the pancreatic cancer mRNA “vaccines.”  Having said that, mRNA vaccines are not “gene therapy,” contrary to the hysteria. A mechanism that leads to epigenetic changes in the young is very unlikely for the new in-the-body technique.

And then there is the unrecognized but indisputable scientific fact that durable immunity to coronaviruses has never been observed in vertebrates, since the first coronavirus was discovered (possibly in the 1930s) and long before it was known to have a “crown.”  Thus, the herd immunity (that we are rapidly losing against measles) against SARS-CoV-2 promoted by authors of the Great Barrington Declaration Jay Bhattacharya of NIH, Martin Kulldorf of ACIP, and others was very unlikely.  Had the vaccines been promoted as one way, and the fastest, but not the way, to fight COVID-19, the background vaccine hesitancy that has been the project of RFKJr for years would not have become turbocharged.

I repeat myself but much of the distemper of our times is the result of the scientistic and uncomprehending hubris of the scientific establishment – “I’m smart and you’re not.”  Still, it is undeniable that the vaccines saved millions of lives by moderating the worst of COVID-19 in many patients.  And myocarditis is more likely to be the result of COVID-19 than an mRNA vaccine.  The next pandemic is what scares me, given the parlous state of medicine, biomedical science, and epidemiological surveillance in this modern world.

Happy Holidays to all!  See you on Boxing Day!