He became a scientist because of the space race. Jeff Coller, Bloomberg distinguished professor of RNA biology and therapeutics at Johns Hopkins University, remembers visiting his grandmother’s house as a child, flicking through the latest issues of National Geographic—which might have new pictures of Jupiter or Saturn, for example, sent back to Earth from NASA’s intrepid Voyager probe. “That was inspiring,” he recalls. “This is what humanity can achieve. This is what Americans can achieve.”Today, however, Coller—who has published many papers on mRNA, including on its role in vaccines and therapeutics—has a very different feeling about American scientific progress, following a $500m funding cut to mRNA vaccine research.1 “It’s very disappointing and scary,” he says. The move was announced in August by the current US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has made multiple unfounded claims about vaccines.2Vaccines that use mRNA have been in development for decades.3 But most…

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