CLEVELAND -- Every year, the U.S. government spends more than 12% of its annual budget on investments that include many aspects of science, from education and capital to research. Last year, $39 billion was spent by the federal government for the National Institutes of Health, while in 2013, the private sector spent $323 billion and in 2011 universities spent $65 billion on science funding.
Why spend so much every year on science?
In this pandemic, we have a clear example of why there needs to be a continuous financial investment in science and in the progression of knowledge for the betterment of humanity. Lawrence Wright, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, outlines in The New Yorker magazine (”The Plague Year,” Jan 4 &11, 2021) the events that began with the start of the pandemic in Wuhan, China. In section 3, he describes the efforts of Dr. Barney S. Graham at the National Institutes of Health who, together with Dr. Jason McLellan, provided the successful molecular sequence that enabled Moderna to generate its vaccine against the SARS-CoV2 virus.
Wright details how Dr. Graham systematically educated and prepared himself over his entire career for the moment of designing the optimal RNA sequence for the COVID-19 vaccine. Drs. Graham and McLellan initiated the era of precision vaccinology by leveraging their decades of accumulated knowledge and experience, built upon their previously designed vaccines for the MERS and RSV viruses.
Dr. Graham received the sequences for SARS-CoV2 on Jan. 10, 2020 which were posted online by Chinese scientists. By Jan. 13, he and his colleagues made “crucial decisions” based on their experience with the structural basis of antigens and the criteria for successful vaccines and then transferred this sequence to Moderna.
This is the RNA sequence in the Moderna vaccine that we are now using. This work was the culmination of Dr. Graham’s 45 years in the educational pipeline that gave him the necessary experience, scientific background, and wisdom to make the correct “educated guesses.”
Dr. Graham received his bachelor’s in science from Rice University in 1975 and then went to the University of Kansas Medical School to receive his doctor of medicine degree in 1979, and in 1991, he received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, where he had been following receiving his M.D. He became professor of medicine at Vanderbilt and in 2000, was recruited to NIH to head the Vaccine Research Center.
Arnold I. Caplan s a professor of biology and director of the Skeletal Research Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Dr. Graham is a perfect example of the continuous intellectual development of a superb physician and scientist. He was uniquely positioned by our national investment strategy in the teaching and progression of science. I am sure that Dr. Graham would tell us that hundreds of individuals contributed to this key contribution to precision vaccinology. Not only will he identify key people in this educational and maturation process, but he will describe where fellowships, grants and private-sector investments culminated in the ability to fabricate an efficacious vaccine in spectacular, record time.
This miracle of ingenuity and commercial preparedness is not a random process. It requires that our society commit to a continuous investment strategy in smart, resourceful, and clever individuals who, by training and prior experiences, can make critical decisions and avoid making critical mistakes. Such training and resources empowered us, as a society, to use the nation’s available science and industry infrastructures to address the pandemic.
Our investment in scientific inquiry and creativity, supported by grants to our educational and research systems, is recorded with every dollar spent and every degree granted. Year after year, we make relatively small investments that bear fruit when a pandemic strikes, or when we face less newsworthy biological tragedies (e.g., cancers).
Maybe it took a pandemic and the story of scientists like Dr. Graham to understand that, to progress as both a society and species, we must have the background and training needed to navigate dangerous territories. Our annual investments in the continuity of science may pay off slowly but it does so with huge dividends for us and for the continued progression of humanity.
Arnold I. Caplan is a professor of biology and director of the Skeletal Research Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He is nationally recognized for his experimentation in musculoskeletal and skin development and his pioneering research on Mesenchymal Stem Cells.
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