How hopeful were you of achieving the kind of results you managed when you started work on RNA biology?We spent 25 years without funding, because we knew that someday it will be a useful vaccine and therapeutic. We were confident it would be useful if we could work out all of the problems.

Please explain your research, and how was it to see your research resulting in Pfizer and Moderna’s anti-Covid vaccines?About 10 years ago, when we started doing clinical trials, we knew modified RNA was headed in the right direction. But when Covid hit, it was great to see RNA coming to the rescue.

At a basic level, people need to understand RNA is kind of a middleman; our DNA has the codes for every protein that allows our cells and our bodies to live. The way a body makes a protein is it takes an mRNA that makes a copy of one of those codes in the DNA and then it shuttles that code into the outside of the cell where a machine called the ribosome reads the code and makes the protein. When you give a vaccine, you give the code for the spike protein of Corona virus or any other vaccine antigen, and then the cell makes the protein.

What are your ongoing projects?Two sickle cell anaemia gene therapies were approved in the United States, which are going to cost about $3.2 million dollars per person, and involve taking bone marrow cells out of the body and infecting them with the virus, giving the person chemotherapy, and giving these cells back. They require very fancy and sophisticated laboratory facilities, making it only available in places such as the US and Europe, and not in places like sub-Saharan Africa.

What we do is target the lipid nano particles to the cell of interest and deliver the enzyme that fixes the DNA in the RNA. All we have to do to fix the gene is to give somebody a shot. No chemotherapy, no fancy lab facility. It’s likely going to cost much less and can be given anywhere. We have programmes that are making HIV vaccines and cures; for autoimmune diseases that look at new ways of treating autoimmune diseases more effectively; and among other vaccines, there are cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, and dengue that we’re working on. There are also therapies for heart problems; and developing treatment for brain diseases— Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s etc.

What’s the scope of RNA-based technology going forward?We have gene therapy programmes where we deliver enzymes that can correct incorrect DNA sequences and fix genetic deficiencies like sickle cell or cystic fibrosis etc. We can deliver therapeutic proteins -- so if somebody is having a stroke, we can deliver an anti-inflammatory protein to turn down the inflammation in the brain.

Do you have collaborations in India?I am working with two different Indian companies to help develop mRNA research. We helped them establish their labs, build GMP production, and also got a couple of collaborations including on an infectious disease vaccine. There are also a couple of gene therapy programmes with Indian groups.

After how some parts of the world reacted to Covid, do you see infectious diseases making a comeback?If you look at NIH funding, chronic diseases get about eight to 10 times more funding than infectious diseases. What people don’t realise, if you look back 250 years 40% of our children worldwide didn’t make it to adulthood. Nowadays it is 4% and the main reason for that is vaccines. Infectious diseases used to play an enormous role in our health and we have got that under control with vaccines. The world is now starting to move away from vaccines, which means infectious diseases are going to be a bigger problem. Children will start dying of measles and of polio and of other diseases that we thought were gone.

How do you address the anti-vaccine ideology that’s gathering momentum?You try and talk to the politicians, but their only interest seems to be in gaining power and appeasing the crazy ideas of their followers. You try to talk to anybody else who’ll listen. There’s 30% of the people just refuse to take vaccines now. For measles you need 95% coverage to protect against having outbreaks. Pretty soon our children are going to be start dying from all of these vaccine-preventable diseases.

Is the world ready to deal with more pandemics such as Covid-19?I think the science is not ready; it’s still going to take us nine or 10 months to make a brand new vaccine, which means that the world is going to have to shut down or do something for that time. We aren’t prepared; the United States certainly doesn’t have plans ready for the next pandemic. And I suspect the rest of the world also. Once the pandemic was over, they said we don’t want to keep spending money on this and they stopped.

Are vaccines in 100 days possible?We have been involved in programmes that can make vaccines or treatments in 40 to 60 days; something like that could, in theory, prevent a pandemic but there’s just not enough interest in keeping that up. It would take commitments of money, space from governments around the world. But they just don’t see that as a good way of spending money.

Isn’t it frustrating as a scientist?Everything about this has been frustrating. In the old days, there were always anti-vaccine people but they weren’t leading our governments. They weren’t in power. And now are making anti-vaccine rules a norm. That’s never happened before. We always assumed politicians were at least smart and now they are showing that they’d rather sell out health for votes. US had one of the highest Covid-19 mortality rates among any developed country, and that’s because of Donald Trump’s refusal to keep things shut down, to wear masks etc.

What impact do you see of US withdrawing from WHO?The bigger problem is that they stopped PEPFAR and USAID, and those were the programmes that were giving hundreds of millions of dollars towards health care, drugs for HIV etc. That has suddenly stopped.

On a different note, what significant changes have you seen in the field of scientific and medical research over the years?We certainly have gotten much smarter and knowledgeable regarding basic science in general. Our technology is phenomenal now; we can sequence a genome for a $100. The biggest problem is that the funding keeps going down. NIH cut the indirect cost down to 15%, which is going to bankrupt a lot of universities and cause a lot of researchers to go out. What they didn’t say is that they save about four billion dollars but they didn’t put that money back into research, rather took it to use that for tax cuts for the rich.

How have things changed for you after being awarded the Nobel?My wife takes advantage of it (laughs). I think we were in Sweden before the Nobel ceremony and she wanted to get her hair done. She walked into the local beauty parlour and asked for an appointment. They said they were booked. And she said but my husband is getting the Nobel Prize today and they immediately took her. I have been taken seriously for my RNA work even before the Covid-19 pandemic but it has certainly helped our equity programmes.

What, according to you, is the future of research?Research will continue but there’s going to be a reduction in the number of institutions that can do research and there’s going to be a reduction in the number of basic science research in the US because universities can’t afford to fund them anymore. But the research will continue, just that at a lower level.