Nurse Patricia Stamper, registered with Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center, reviews a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine before it is administered to a healthcare provider at the hospital on December 16, 2020 in Aurora, Colorado.
Michael Ciaglo | Getty Images
The rapid development of vaccines for Covid has sparked some debate as to who deserves the most credit: the government with its Operation Warp Speed, pharmaceutical companies or university researchers pioneering discoveries about messenger RNA.
The best answer, I think, is that the development of the vaccines, like most other major American innovations in the past 75 years, is largely due to a special decision made after World War II to change the roles of government and closely intertwine private industry. and academia.
This triple helix was designed by the influential science administrator Vannevar Bush, who had a foot in all three camps. He was a technical dean at MIT, a founder of Raytheon, and then the government’s chief science administrator during World War II, overseeing the construction of the atomic bomb, among other things.
In a 1945 report to President Truman with the quintessentially American title “Science, The Endless Frontier,” Bush advised the administration not to build its own large research labs, as it had done for the atomic bomb project, but to fund research instead. at universities and business laboratories.
“No American has been more influential in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush,” MIT President Jerome Wiesner later stated, adding that his “main innovation was the plan to contract instead of building large government laboratories. with universities and industrial laboratories. “
Much of the government’s post-war scientific funding went to basic, curiosity-driven research that had no practical applications yet, such as how quantum mechanics could explain what happens on the surface of semiconductor materials or how bits of RNA act as messengers to build proteins . . Bush knew that discoveries in basic science would be the seed corn that would eventually grow into contingencies, such as transistors or mRNA vaccines.
The helix of government, the academic world that Vannevar Bush envisioned, has created boilers of innovation around major research universities.
This government-academy partnership has spawned the great innovations that propelled the American economy in the post-war era, including microchips, computers, graphical user interfaces, GPS, lasers, the Internet, and search engines. For example, Google was started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as an academic project at Stanford funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
Over the years, an imperfect but productive system was put together to distribute the proceeds and intellectual property. For example, in 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which made it easier for universities to take advantage of patents, even if the research was funded by the government.
One of the most important innovations of our time is the gene editing technology known as CRISPR. One of the inventors is Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna, who won this year’s Nobel Prize and is engaged in a protracted patent battle with Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard.
They and their institutions are good examples of the mutual relationship between government and science. Their academic research was funded in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and they both started private companies to commercialize their CRISPR discoveries for gene editing, disease diagnosis, and now coronavirus detection.
This process also led to the Covid vaccines. Over the years, the NIH and DARPA have funded university research into the workings of DNA and RNA. For example, in 2005, a pair of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, showed how to modify a molecule of messenger RNA so that it could get into human cells without being attacked by the body’s immune system.
Two entrepreneurial start-ups
Shortly afterwards, two entrepreneurial start-ups were founded to commercialize medical applications for this mRNA: BioNTech in Germany and Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When the Covid pandemic hit, they came up with ways to use mRNA to instruct human cells to make parts of a spike protein that would boost immunity to the coronavirus. They were helped by guaranteed purchase deals and logistical support from the government’s Operation Warp Speed.
The helix of government, the academia Bush envisioned, has led to boilers of innovation around major research universities. Silicon Valley began to grow around Stanford in the 1950s when the Provost Frederick Terman began encouraging professors and graduate students to commercialize their discoveries, leading to the birth of companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Sun and Google.
Kendall Square in Cambridge is the new Silicon Valley. Located next to MIT and close to Harvard, it houses centers of more than 120 biotech companies within a mile of each other, including Moderna, Pfizer, Merck, Novartis and Sanofi.
And increasingly, this model is leading from major universities encouraging the commercialization of their government-backed research to other thriving hubs of innovation across the country, from Austin and Houston to Raleigh-Durham and Seattle, to Nashville and New Orleans.
Walter Isaacson is the author of “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race,” published March 9 by Simon and Schuster.