Science Friday - COVID Fact Check, Aging Cells, News Roundup. Jan 8, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Fact Check My Feed: What’s Up With These COVID-19 Mutations? It’s a new year, and that means there’s a whole slew of new COVID-19 news to dive into, including an overwhelming amount of new information about vaccines and mutations. The U.S. has now administered roughly five million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, far behind the nation’s goal of vaccinating 20 million by the end of 2020. The two approved COVID-19 vaccines, one from Pfizer and one from Moderna, are intended to be given over the course of two doses. But there’s a discussion within the medical community about whether or not both doses are necessary for every patient.  Mutations are also an increasing concern. Variants from the U.K. and South Africa are concerning epidemiologists, and appear to be spreading. Though there’s no proof that either are more deadly, they may be more infectious. Joining Ira to explain is Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security, based in Seattle, Washington.   Can Cells Rewind The Wrinkles Of Time? As a cell ages, its DNA goes through a process called “methylation”—gaining extra methyl chemical groups. These groups can affect how the genes’ encoded information is expressed, without actually changing the sequence of genes. In work published in Nature, researchers explore whether reversing that methylation can reprogram the cells back to a more youthful state. They used modified adenoviruses to introduce three specific transcription factors into mouse retinal ganglion cells, a type of neuron found in the eye. These transcription factors helped revert the cell to a more immature state—and also seemed to let the cell behave in a more ‘youthful’ way. David Sinclair, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors of the study, joins Ira to discuss what the work means, and what it could tell scientists about the aging process.   Trump’s New EPA ‘Transparency’ Rule Could Hamper Science This week, the Environmental Protection Agency passed the “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler stated that “the American public has the right to know what scientific studies underline the Agency’s regulatory decisions.” But critics say that this outgoing policy by the Trump administration can be used to hamper new environmental regulations. Amy Nordrum lines out the policy and other science headlines from the week.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Deaths from COVID-19 are setting new records, topping 4,100 per day this week. COVID-19 vaccinations in the U.S. have been rolling out for nearly four weeks. Some people are fearful of taking the shot. They say they are concerned about possible side effects. This week, the CDC published a study looking at a handful of allergic reactions to the vaccine. Amy Nordrum is here to fill us in on that story, and other says. science headlines from the week. She's an editor at MIT Technology Review. Always good to see you, Amy. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. All right, let's get into our questions about this. Everyone is interested in the possible side effects of these vaccines. Politicians were taking them on camera to show it was safe. What did the CDC data tell us? Well, there have been a few

severe allergic reactions to the coronavirus vaccines being rolled out right now, but they've been very few. fewer than two dozen for almost two million people who are covered in that new CDC report about it. And when the CDC announced these numbers on Wednesday, the agency emphasized that these reactions are rare and that the benefit of getting the vaccine and being protected against the virus far outweighs the risk of any allergic reaction. And we know allergic reactions to some people do happen with all vaccines, right? Yeah, that's right. They can happen with flu vaccines as well, though it's extremely rare in that case. And in the case of the coronavirus vaccines, they mostly happen in people who have had a history of allergies.

If it does happen, it's treatable. The CDC is suggesting that you stay on site for 15 to 30 minutes after you're vaccinated just in case as a precaution. The virus killed 4,000 people just yesterday, as you said, it was the deadliest day yet in the pandemic. So it's still definitely worth getting vaccinated when you have the chance. Later in the hour, we're going to fact-check your feed and talk more about vaccine news that has been popping up. Let's move on to your next story. There are less than two weeks until inauguration day, and President Trump is rolling back some rules issuing new ones on his way out. One rule that was finalized is the EPA's transparency rule. What does this rule do?

Right. This rule announced on Tuesday. It's effective immediately. And it changes what evidence the agency can consider when it's making decisions or publishing guidance or information to the public. The rule basically says the agency should give more. more weight to scientific studies with data that's publicly available and less weight to studies that rely on data that hasn't been made public. And so the EPA has said that this is for the sake of transparency. But critics have said that this will make it harder for the EPA to include important

studies that haven't been published publicly, perhaps because they have sensitive health or medical information about people who participated in the studies who were promised confidentiality. And in particular, critics are worried about what this might mean for studies used in toxicology and epidemiology to determine someone's exposure to the risk of something like a chemical substance. So they're basically saying that this rule is an attack on science. Yeah, the American Lung Association has come out against it, the American Medical Association, American Public Health Association. The EPA's own scientific advisors had said that this rule could make the EPA less efficient. I mean, obviously a lot of these groups are for having more data publicly

available and therefore data transparency whenever possible. But the scientific community in this case is arguing that we shouldn't demote this other important group of studies that don't have public data available but which are still scientifically very useful and valid. Do we know how the Biden administration might handle this rule? Could it roll back some of these rulings? Yeah, there's many changes that the Trump administration has made to environmental rules that Biden administration might take another look at. Trump administration has also loosened restrictions on methane emissions from oil and gas wells, just as one example. So Biden administration could certainly change this. And in the meantime, the rule does allow the EPA administrator to grant exemptions to this rule. So in the meantime,

they could use that to kind of work around it if they want. Let's move on to your next story, because it's really an interesting one about a law that would create a White House AI, artificial intelligence office. Tell us about that. Yeah, so a week ago, New Year's Day, the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act became law. It was kind of tucked into this very long defense bill that Congress had passed and President Trump vetoed. And then Congress overrode the veto to make it law. And this one chunk, this AI Act, lays out basically a national strategy for how the government plans to invest in AI research moving forward. It was supported by many large research universities and engineering associations and by companies like Google and Amazon and IBM that are active.

in this research. And it does a number of things. It creates a White House AI office to coordinate AI research, and it expands a network of AI research centers that were already operating under the National Science Foundation. And it also gives billions in new funding to AI research at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. So there's a lot of different changes that this has laid out. Funds would still need to be appropriated by Congress in order to make all of this actually happen. But now the plan is in place, the framework is there. You know, whenever AI technology comes up, there is also a conversation about ethics and how it will affect people and not equally. How this tech should be used? Will this

office put that conversation in the spotlight, too? Yeah, there's a number of things that this act could do on that question specifically. So the funding that would go to NIST in particular would be focused on creating standards and guidelines for trustworthy AI and how we should think about that and how programs should be designed with ethics in mind. And then a few of the centers, the research centers that have already started up are focused on specific topics that might help improve people's lives through AI research. So there's two in coordination with the USDA studying how AI could be applied to agriculture. Biden administration has also been supportive of these. centers and the National Science Foundation has a number of funding programs already devoted to

fairness and ethics and AI research too. So more of those could certainly come or be expanded under this new act. Yeah, that leads me to ask you, do we know where some of the federal projects are located? What are the projects that this office will fund? They haven't gotten specific into the projects yet. They've mostly focused on supporting more of these centers. And then typically the National Science Foundation decides how to award that money, where to grant. it moving forward if it is funded. So there are seven centers already now in place. So this funding would likely expand the centers and provide more universities and

companies with opportunities to get that funding. We know there was this huge hack of government agencies and computers. And officials say it was from the Russians. Would this law combat that or affect it somehow or is that a totally different area? Well, cybersecurity, AI is increasingly being used in cybersecurity, and there are programs within the NSF and probably also within this act that would contribute to research in that area. It's hard to say whether it would have prevented it in that specific case. It would kind of depend on what that research was able to do. But there will be more funding through this act, certainly, for AI, for the purposes of national security and for cybersecurity in particular.

Okay. Let's move on to another story of your work. on, and that is a disease that has been affecting sea stars that scientists have been studying for years. We have reported on that here on Science Friday. There's a new idea about what might be causing this. That's right. Yeah, millions of sea stars have died from what's called C-star wasting disease that causes them to shrink up and turn colors and eventually die. And for a while, researchers thought this was caused by some kind of virus or maybe a bacteria. But this week, a new study in frontiers in microbiology showed that wasting disease is actually caused by the sea stars

surrounding environment and not some kind of pathogen. So the sea stars need to absorb oxygen from the water in order to survive. But if there's enough microorganisms right around them, the microorganisms take up all the oxygen and there isn't enough for the sea star. So it basically suffocates. And these researchers now believe that these microorganisms that never actually touch the star sea star itself but are just kind of floating in the water around it are the cause of this very common disease. Do we know what is changing the water around it? Could it be climate change playing a role here? Yeah, definitely. Climate change is definitely playing a role here. The driving factors that they've been able to identify are things like sudden changes in water temperature that create more microorganisms

in the water, high concentrations of ammonia in the water, upwelling of nutrients from down below, deeper in the water. Climate change is driving a number of changes, including just decreasing, the amount of oxygen in sea water generally and increasing microbial activity. And so it sort of makes it a more difficult problem to solve because it's not as simple as just a virus or one single pathogen, which in itself wouldn't be an easy problem to tackle. But it's this very multifaceted problem of climate change. You know, it's always been talked about that climate change is usually not the only cause of something, especially when we're talking about water and how it affects the life in it. Usually they say it's also probably runoff from agricultural fertilizers,

things like that that cause the blooms in the water and suck up the oxygen. Yeah, definitely. Anything that would increase that microbial activity or contribute to sudden changes in the water temperature could play a role here. And even the type of sea star itself, they found that sea stars with rougher surfaces were more susceptible to this because water moves more slowly over top of them than it does over smoother sea stars. So the oxygen in the water isn't as quickly replenished. So there's even some differences among the sea stars themselves that make them more or less susceptible to this.

That's interesting. I never thought about that different surfaces of the sea stars. Final story for you, because I can relate to this story. There's a neat story about a group of scientists who have created conductive ink. I mean, is this really nice? new? Well, it has been possible for a while to use printers and conductive inks of different kinds to print an electronic circuit onto a surface or an object. You can make this kind of ink by mixing a highly conductive material like graphene or carbon nanotubes into water. But researchers

at Wuhan University and China found a way to make it so that this ink could be used not just in a printer, but in a ballpoint pin. So it's the first of its kind to be, and the cheapest of its kind to be used in a ballpoint pin, which means it's possible to draw circuits wherever you like very quickly, and you don't need a printer in order to do that. You know, I thought this was something hobbyists. Did I remember when I was 15, 16, 17, when I was a teenager, I used to create printed circuits, and we would use conductive ink or just the opposite of that. And I know that back in the 1860s when there was something called the Pentelagraph, which was the forerunner of the fax machine, that used conductive ink on it. That's why I say it's not a new idea, but can I, can I buy this pen?

I'd love to get a hold of one of these pen. Can I get it yet? Well, they're actually, they do have a company. They're making a bunch of these pins with their conductive ink inside of it. They say they cost about a dollar, only a dollar each. Right now they're using these pins in schools to teach kids about electricity. So I don't know if they're much more widely available beyond that, but they're certainly getting these produced and getting them out there. I love it. I love it. Thank you very much, Amy. Great way to end your reporting. Thanks, Ira. Amy Nordrum is commissioning editor at MIT Technology Review.

We're going to take a break, and after we come back, we'll fact-check your COVID news with a special focus on vaccines. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. It's a new week and a new year, and that means there's a whole slew of COVID news to take a look at. All this new information about vaccines and mutations. It can be pretty overwhelming, right? So we're here to fact-check-your-feet. With our guest, Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University's Center for Global Health and Security. She's based in Seattle.

Welcome back, Angela. Always great to have you. It's always great to be here, Ira. Thanks for having me. You're quite welcome. Let's start with distribution of the vaccine for a minute. We've seen a lot of coverage that the U.S. fell very short of its goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020. In fact, we hear that just over three million doses were administered. Why did we fall so short? Well, I think one of the reasons we fell so short, and it is really complicated. And this, I should add as a disclaimer, that I am not involved in any way in the distribution. So I only know about this from a sort of bigger picture level. But I think that one of the big problems that we've had with

distribution is the fact that there really is no centralized vaccine distribution plan. Operation Warp Speeds' involvement in that really ends at the point where they allocate the vaccines to the different states. And at that point, it becomes each individual state or localities' responsibility to distribute that vaccine. And some states are doing better than others. For example, some states have implemented policies that actually make the vaccine much more difficult to access for some people, such as New York, in which the vaccines are only to be given out at hospitals. Right now, when we have... have an unprecedented number of COVID patients going into hospitals, that makes using that environment

to also distribute vaccines to healthy people very challenging. So it's a really complex problem. It has a lot to do with logistics, and it also has a lot to do with all the different rules in the different places where the vaccines are actually being distributed on the ground. Yeah, we have no national policy that would be the same for everybody. That's exactly right. And this was a problem that we also saw with with really testing, each state and sometimes local health departments are predominantly involved in doing these tests and collecting the data and then reporting it to a centralized federal data collator. And this has also really led to a lot of confusion trying to look at the national

numbers rather than the numbers by states. And so now we're seeing the same thing with vaccine distribution. It really does argue that for really important public health measures that affect all of us in the U.S., there really does need to be a federal national plan to unify us and to make sure that these things run smoothly. Do you think now that we're getting a new president in a couple of weeks, that things could speed up with the new administration? I really hope so. And certainly, President-elect Biden has made it clear that he does plan to have more of a federal plan. He plans to provide more federal leadership. And I really do think that's what's needed because we shouldn't be able to access really critical public health measures like vaccines based on the politics of who our local

governor or leaders are. You know, a few years ago when Tony Fauci was on the show talking about vaccinations, because we used to have him on regularly, he related a story that when he was a young child, I think he was six or seven, and he was living in New York. And there was an outbreak of small in New York City. But because everybody used to get inoculated with smallpox, remember when you were a baby, they don't do that anymore. Yes. The infrastructure. I'm actually not that old, but I know the story. Well, the infrastructure was there so that they could inoculate, what, eight million people in two weeks. I mean, doesn't that speak to us saying, hey, we've learned a lesson we should create a permanent infrastructure because we're going to have more outbreaks of viruses? Absolutely. And, you know, smallpox.

is a great example of that. That was the first vaccine. In fact, vaccines are called vaccines because the virus that you use to inoculate somebody against smallpox or variola virus is vaccinia virus or cowpox virus. So technically a vaccine is only really a smallpox inoculation because most vaccines are not based on vaccinia virus now. Of course, we now use the term generally to mean an immunization. But I think that that's a great reminder that we should maybe go back to basics that sometimes we need to be able to rapidly and dynamically and flexibly start vaccinating a lot of people, especially if there's an outbreak of a reemergent virus or if there is an outbreak of a new virus. Now we have all these different vaccine technologies and we've shown during this

pandemic at least that we can rapidly approve them for human use and that they're actually quite efficacious. We need to start thinking about how we can do that as part of a larger, longer pandemic and epidemic preparedness plan. We now have two approved vaccines here in the U.S. One from Pfizer, one from Moderna. These are both two dose vaccines. And you know, we have been hearing talk about whether or not both doses are necessary to try to stretch the vaccine supply out. What's going on here? So that was first proposed before we started to realize what serious issues we were having with vaccine distribution. But the idea there was when those vaccines were submitted to the FDA for evaluation for emergency use authorization, both of them showed a certain

level of protection after the first shot. And after about 14 days after you get your first shot, there's really measurable protection conferred by that one shot. Now, the caveats there is that we don't know how long that protection would last after just one shot, because of course the clinical trials were evaluating them as two-shot regimens. So knowing that we would only have about 20 million doses of each by the end of 2020, people have proposed maybe we can give people one shot, and that will confer some protection, and then either we could leave it at one shot, or maybe we could give them a second shot just later on when we have more vaccine supplies. Now, I think that there is merit to some of those arguments, but the real caveat there is that we don't have any efficacy data on

changing up the dosing regimen. So right now, given that we aren't able to get the vaccines that we do have into people's arms, I think it's really premature to be suggesting that we just change the dosing schedules without doing any research to see if that would provide the same level of protection as the dosing schedules that were actually evaluated. And the UK, I understand, is trying this one-dose method right now. The UK is actually recommending a delayed second dose. So they're there is a difference with that. Now, it may be, you know, we do get many vaccines in what's called a prime boost regimen where you get the first dose and then you get a booster shot later on. And for some vaccines, we know that you can get that booster shot over a large range of time.

And in fact, one of the trials for the AstraZeneca vaccine did give the second dose up to 12 weeks later and didn't see a measurable decrease in efficacy. Of course, that vaccine is not yet approved in the U.S. However, the U.K. has also recommended that for the Pfizer vaccine, and there is no data about the effect that delaying a second dose might have. So again, this really falls into the category of something that we can think about, we can discuss. And if we do decide to move to this, we should actually test it before we start doing this at scale, because we really don't know what the results would be from that. Yeah, so we're basically conducting a real-life experiment. That's exactly right. And my other problem with this strategy is that I get that we are in a very dire,

very urgent situation right now with the numbers of cases that we have. But at the same time, we aren't really in a situation where the problem right now is vaccine supplies. So we don't necessarily need to do that. Again, we need to work out the problems with distributing the vaccines that we already have before we try to figure out how we can protect more people by stretching the supplies that are limited. Aren't there other one-dose vaccines in the pipeline? I'm thinking of like Johnson and Johnson. That's right. So Johnson and Johnson is a different type of vaccine from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Those are mRNA vaccines that essentially give your cells instructions on how to make the spike protein from SARS-Coronavirus 2 that your immune system will then respond to.

The Johnson-and-Johnson vaccine actually uses a different virus called an ad no-virus. that will replicate to a certain degree and produce that protein from SARS-Coronavirus to the spike protein. It's thought that sometimes vaccines that involve actually some level of virus replication can induce alone in one dose those longer-term immune responses just because they're more stimulatory to your immune system. And the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is in phase three trials that will probably read out this month, or at least in early February. And I believe that they're evaluating both a two dose and a single shot regimen. So if that single shot regimen shows efficacy levels anywhere near the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, I think that might end this argument for good

because we'll suddenly have a huge supply of an alternative vaccine that's actually also easier to distribute than the mRNA vaccines because it doesn't require the same sort of cold storage that those vaccines do. And Jayad Jay has the capacity to make a lot of vaccine, don't they? They do. And the viral-vector adenovirus system that they're using, they've actually already developed as an experimental vaccine for HIV. So they already have the manufacturing capacity for that. They've further built that out as they were evaluating these vaccines. I think that could be a real game changer, assuming that it does show the same level of efficacy that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines did. There was some talk that when the Biden administration took over, that it might sort of nationalize the vaccine production, effort the way we did in World War II, we told the auto companies to make tanks instead of cars.

Could you see that happening? I think so. I think that, you know, there's been a lot of talk about using the Defense Production Act for both vaccines, as well as for components of the vaccine supply chain. So things like sterile saline, sterile liquids that are used to formulate the vaccines, glass vials and rubber stoppers and syringes, all that kind of thing that people don't think a lot about, but that are obviously really necessary for not only creating vaccines, but means to actually administer them to people. We've also heard a lot of discussion about using the Defense Production Act to make PPE for health care workers and potentially also for the American people, so to provide people with more means to protect themselves. And I think all of those

things would be a great use of the Defense Production Act. A lot of the times I don't like comparing public health measures to wartime measures. But in this case, I think that we really should see a national effort to do those things. And I think that would be a great way of doing it. Help me understand something about the whole business about the coronavirus mutating. When we talk about it mutating, are we talking about an entirely different strain that we need to develop a new vaccine for or what? So that's a great question. And this is one thing I think that gets very confusing. is that people often use the word strain quite a bit. But the word strain actually is not tremendously specific in terms of virologists.

Some people will use it to mean a variant that's genetically distinct. Some people will use it to mean a variant that's immunologically distinct. And some people sort of use it to describe different viruses that emerge in different places, for example. Like if you looked at the different Ebola viruses that have caused outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the 2018 Ebola virus would be a different strain from the 2016 Ebola virus that emerged there. So the term strain isn't very precise, and people use it a lot of times very differently. The variants that have been described so far in the United Kingdom and in South Africa, you know, it's debatable whether you want to call them a strain, but they're genetically different.

And the key thing there is that they have a number of different point mutations and some deletions throughout the genome. What we don't really know is what those different mutations do. Now, it's normal for RNA viruses like coronaviruses to acquire mutations every time they replicate. So it's not surprising that we're seeing a lot of different variants emerging because the coronavirus, unfortunately, has had many opportunities to replicate since it's spread so broadly through the population. What's alarming about these two variants is that they seem to be more transmissible. Fortunately, they don't seem to be more pathogenic. They don't seem to make disease worse, but they do seem to be much easier to transmit to people,

which is a problem for our health care system. Right now, we don't know, actually, if they will have any effect on immunity produced by the vaccines, but they could. So far, it's looking more like the variant that was identified first in South Africa is more likely to have an impact on immunity, but those experiments are in progress, and we don't actually know that right now. I'm Ira Plato.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking with Dr. Angela Rasmussen, fact-checking your feed. All kinds of new information. It's hard to keep track of it. We saw Denmark kill millions of minks after discovering they had COVID.

What other links to animals do we know of with COVID? Could it be dogs and cats or things that we just don't know about or suspect? So that's a very good question and one that I think about a lot because it has long-term implications for controlling SARS coronavirus too. So initially, this was probably not widespread throughout a number of different animal species. But we've since learned both experimentally and in terms of animals being infected in the real world that there are a number of different species that are susceptible to infections. So cats, minks, and ferrets, we know experimentally that hamsters are also susceptible. They're used often as a model of pathogenesis or the way that the virus causes disease.

Mice can be susceptible to some of these variants, including the variant discovered in the UK and in South Africa, and so on and so forth. So we know that there are a number of different animal species that can be infected with it. The real question long term for me is will the virus actually spill back into any of these species in the wild and start circulating there. That's when things start becoming really unpredictable and you run the risk of having the virus be established in a new wildlife reservoir. Some flu viruses are carried by birds, wild birds, are they not? Is there a possibility this could happen to? Yeah, so probably not with birds. To my knowledge, there aren't any birds that have been discovered to be susceptible to SARS coronavirus too. And influence,

The natural host of influenza is migratory waterfowl. And that's one of the reasons why flu mutates so much because it's infecting these wild birds that are moving from place to place. And then it can also infect some livestock species, including domestic chickens and ducks, as well as pigs. And so that leads to a huge pool of different hosts across different species that can lead to the emergence of a bunch of different new influenza viruses and strains. With SARS-Coronavirus 2, fortunately there's not a bunch of different SARS-Coronavirus 2 circulating out there, at least that we know of.

There's no other subtypes of this virus, as there is with influenza. But it is certainly a concern that some type of animal that does have a larger geographic range would be able to support this, and that could potentially introduce it then to other species, including humans. So this is all a big question mark right now, but it's something we do need to think. think about over the long term, because obviously it has implications for controlling this virus. If the virus is able to continue evolving in other species, even after we mostly control spread within the human population. So just to be sure, and to talk about it with our listeners, there's no evidence so far that we should be worried about our house pets. No, not really.

In fact, if anything, we should be worried about infecting our house pets, because cats can get get somewhat sick. Dogs are susceptible to it, but they don't actually get very sick. And there's certainly been no indication that there's any dog to human transmission occurring either. But so far, to my knowledge, there's no reported zoonotic infections of SARS coronavirus too from domestic animals or house cats to people. Okay, we're going to take a short break to digest a whole bunch of stuff that we heard. But when we come back, we'll continue to fact check your feed with virologist, Dr. Angela Rasmussen. Stay with us. As I say, we'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're back with Dr. Angela Rasmussen,

virologist at Georgetown University Center for Global Health and Security. She's based in Seattle, Washington. And we're fact-checking your feed. We're talking about the latest COVID news to start off this new year, hoping to decipher all the stuff that we've been hearing. Okay, next question to you, Angela. About a quarter of the public is hesitant to take this vaccine, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And it's not just anti-vaxxers. We've seen and heard stories of health care workers who are rejecting it, saying they don't trust that vaccine to be safe and effective. What's your take on this? Yeah, this is something I think about all the time, because the latest herd immunity threshold estimates that we need to achieve for vaccination is probably around at least

75% of the population, which means we especially need those healthcare workers to take the vaccine if they're able to. Now, that said, I think it's completely understandable that many people, including health care workers, are somewhat suspicious of the process because, you know, certainly the federal government has not handled every aspect of this pandemic very well, and some parts not at all. And people are aware that things like Operation Warp Speed, you know, sort of implies that we're going at this warp speed, that might mean we're also cutting corners in terms of safety or efficacy. The good news to that is that while the process of reviewing the vaccines and approving them, or at least authorizing them for emergency use, was actually

rigorous and not a lot was cut out of that compared to what we normally evaluate for other vaccines. We were able to shave time off of this process by doing something simultaneously rather than sequentially as they normally would be done. There are some areas where we don't have as much information, for example, about durability or how long the protection of the vaccines last. But what I keep telling people when I'm asked about this is that the phase three clinical trials especially were the same size that they would be for any other clinical trial not done in this emergency sort of scenario. They were tens of thousands of patients. They looked at safety very robustly. They also showed surprisingly high efficacy. And by surprising, I mean, that we didn't really know how these

were going to perform at scale, and they really exceeded our expectations. I think everybody was hoping for something around 70 percent would have been great, and these are 94 to 95 percent efficacious at preventing symptomatic COVID. So the phase three trials were actually great news, but they were also done in a way that allowed us to collect much of the data that we normally would collect, at least for in the short term. So I try to educate people about that. But I think when you're talking to people who are skeptical of the process or are hesitant about the vaccines, you know, we need to really be thoughtful about the way we're approaching people and engaging with them. We can't write it off as, oh, you're just not aware of the science or, you know, you're skeptical anyways. We have to listen to

people's concerns and take them seriously and address any questions that they have. And I think that it's really important for people like myself, as well as physicians and vaccinologists, immunologists, to really take these people seriously to try to win hearts and minds rather than just, you know, wag our fingers and tell people that they should be taking it. You know, were you surprised as I was that something that normally we've been told takes about four years to develop? I mean, these two vaccines were developed and distributed within nine, ten months? I'm surprised just because so much has gone wrong with almost everything that we've tried to implement. But I'm very pleasantly surprised that this part of it did not go wrong.

I think that, you know, if anything that we can learn from this expedited approval of process, it's that maybe we should rethink the way that we're evaluating some vaccines and drugs. Maybe it should actually take less time to evaluate some of these things. Maybe we should be doing preclinical studies, for example, in animals at the same time as we're doing phase one clinical trials for safety, because that did shave off quite a bit of time. And that ultimately, that shaves off a lot of costs as well. That makes it certainly easier for people to access these vaccines once they're finally approved and thoroughly evaluated. And I think it also is a point worth making, but I think most people don't realize that once a vaccine is given full FDA approval, that doesn't mean that we stop studying it. People who get vaccines, including things like the measles, mumps, and rebella vaccine, which has been around for decades, you know, they still study what happens when people get those vaccines.

So we're getting information all the time, even for vaccines that are already approved and have been on the market for years. So it's not an abnormal process to keep studying these things after they're being used in the general population. And maybe we should think about how we can balance the need for, you know, excellent scientific data before approval, but also the needs to get vaccines out quickly to a large number of people to improve public health. Have you received the vaccine? I have not. And in fact, I probably won't until the summer or the spring whenever it becomes available since I'm, relatively low risk. But I'm actually moving to Canada to take a job at a vaccine research institute

there. And there I will be considered a frontline worker. So I'll probably be able to get the vaccine as soon as I arrive in Canada. So I'm saying, I'm thinking about this, that you will then be sort of a role model for people who say, look, there's a health care worker, someone who's actually a researcher, not fearful of taking the vaccine. Maybe you can convince those people that is a safe vaccine. Yeah, I think that's really important. And, you know, many of my colleagues who are frontline health care workers now have been posting their vaccine selfies for that same reason. I think that's especially important when you're looking at people from communities of color. I think that in that case, you know, there's a lot of vaccine hesitancy, rightfully so, in those

communities, because not only is there a long history of really medical and biomedical research exploitation of those communities, but currently, they are being disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic because of racially based health disparities. So I think it's particularly important for people of color, people from marginalized communities to see people from within those communities also getting vaccinated, building that confidence. But I think overall, it is really important for people to model good public health behavior, including taking vaccines, letting people know, you know, this is something I would do. I'm not asking you to do something that I would.

wouldn't do myself or that I wouldn't recommend to my family. And I certainly am recommending to my entire family, including my parents and older people in my family, that they should get the vaccines as soon as they are able to do so. Well, Dr. Rasmussen, we have run out of time. We'd like to thank you, as always, for taking time to be with us. It's always a pleasure to be here with you, Ira. Thank you. And please stay in touch as you move across the border to our neighbors to the north. I will. Absolutely. That'll be some time in March or April. and I'm happy to come back via the airwaves anytime. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, virologist at Georgetown University Center for Global Health and Security,

she's based in Seattle. For the rest of the hour, looking at how cells age, and whether there's anything that can be done to slow, stop, or even reverse that process. As DNA ages, it gains sort of dust bunnies, extra methyl groups tacked on, and those methyl groups can affect how the genes themselves are expressed, without changing the actual sequence of genes. In work published in the journal Nature, researchers are looking at whether reversing that methylation

can sweep away some of the cruft and reprogram the cells back to a more youthful state. And it can, at least in mouse eye cells. Joining me now to talk about the work, and what it means is one of the authors of that report. David Sinclair, professor in the Department of Genetics, co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the biology of aging at Harvard Med School. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Ari. It's great to be on.

What do you mean when we say a cell is aging? What happens to this cell over time? Well, this has been a debate for, oh, at least 40, 50 years. And there's really a lot that goes on in aging cells. Many of your listeners would know about the shortening of the ends of chromosomes called telomeres. We get proteins that accumulate that exacerbate Alzheimer's, disease. But there's a new theory about aging that's gaining a lot of traction. And that is that the cells forget how to function correctly because they cannot read their DNA correctly. And that's really what my lab's being focused on for the last few years. And we recently published about how to manipulate that process. In fact, your group looked at a way to wind back the clock in a cell.

Tell us how you did that. Well, what's been discovered just in the last five or so years about aging is that there is this clock, these DNA methyl chemicals that accumulate like crust on DNA. And we can read those very easily. A student in my lab could tell you your rough biological age within about 5% error. Within about a day, it's pretty easy. And what this predicts actually is that how old you are biologically, not chronologically, throw away the birthday candles. And some people are older than they would otherwise think.

some are younger. And this also predicts how sick and or healthy they're going to be in old age. And this DNA methylation clock, we think, is part of the system that goes wrong during aging. And what we tested was if we could reverse or scrape off those methyl groups and reset the cell, maybe aging would actually go backwards. And you did this in mice in eye cells, cells in the eye? Well, yeah, we're not an eye lab, but we thought the eye would be one place to start. Often people ask me, did you choose the eye because you thought it would work? In fact, my student at the time, Juan Cheng Lu, picked the eye because he likes the eye. But what we did in the lab was we spent a few years, actually, Wang Chang spent a few years failing to reverse the age of cells.

And if he succeeded, typically those cells became tumerogenic. in other words, could form tumors in an animal or probably in a human too. It's very difficult, it turns out, to reverse aging partially without going all the way back to a stem cell, which, of course, we don't want to do because that's essentially what a cancer is. But he hit upon a really specific three-gene combination that was able to partially reverse the age of cells in the dish, but not go too far. And we applied that to the nerves at the back of the eye. in mice, and it did reverse the age of those cells. So you restored the vision in mice who had

lost their vision by turning the clock back? Exactly right. But what was questioned at the time before our paper was, if you turn the clock back, is it just symbolic or does it actually have an effect on the cells? Similar to if you move the hands of a clock backward, you're not going to change time. This was the belief. But what we discovered is that this three-gene combination, these genes actually come from from embryos, typically a turn on during embryogenesis, we call it. Those three genes actually didn't just wind the clock back, but the cells came back to life and had a youthful pattern of genes on and off. And they actually started to function as though they were young again. You don't wind the cells all the way back to where they were in the embryo.

You just go a certain distance. Yeah. So that's the exciting part about this is that if you use this combination. The cells have a barrier to losing their identity and going back too far, which is remarkable that it exists. We just lucked out. We didn't know that that was even possible. But also, what's fascinating is that the cells somehow have a backup copy of the youthful patterns, and we're searching for where that information is stored right now. And you're saying that there's no reason why this could not be applied to other cells in body to reverse aging? Yeah, actually what's exciting is that there are many labs now who are working on this. We call it partial epigenetic reprogramming or we're starting to use the word

rejuvenation. And they're testing other tissues. We've now tested other cells in the eye, such as the ones that are involved in macular degeneration. It seems to be working there. Colleagues of mine have rejuvenated muscle and there are rumors of other tissues working. There was a recent paper from Spain, Manuel Serrano, a colleague of ours who rejuvenated the brain in mice and improved memory. So we think that this could be a, dare I say it, a universal way to reverse aging in mammals and perhaps one day in people. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So let's get to that part about people because that's what everybody is going to be asking. What do you need to have a proof of concept in people here?

Well, in the mice, what we saw were with three different experiments. We saw nerves regrow when they were injured. We saw that glaucoma, which is, I think many people know as pressure-induced damage to the retina, and just old age. We took those three systems in mice, and our three-gene combination actually improved the function of the eye in all three cases. In the case of glaucoma and old age, we looked at vision, and it was, improved. On the case of the old mice, it was actually restored to young mice. I came home after

getting that result with the lab and said, we cured blindness, at least in mice. And I think my wife told me to go empty the dishwasher. But it was a really interesting finding. But to your question, we think that we can, we want to try to attempt to reverse blindness or vision loss in people. And we're going to start with patients who have glaucoma. And when would that start? Well, there's a local company here in Boston, life biosciences, that's working towards that. It's probably a couple of years at least before we start to put the gene therapy, as it is right now, into patients, but we're working as hard as we can to safely make that possible. You know, people are going to hear this interview and they're going to want to get in on this treatment

or perhaps even the tests themselves. Is there any way to do that? No, not yet. It's not at the stage where I would say we know enough about it. It is a very powerful potential medicine that's doing things that we thought were impossible just a few years ago. But we're not at the point where we can treat anybody. This is for most medicines, but particularly when it comes to gene therapy. This is truly rewinding the clock, and we don't know.

some fundamental things, such as how long does the effect last? How many times can you repeat the process? So we've engineered our gene therapy to be inducible. What that means is we can give a mouse and hopefully a patient, an antibiotic that turns the genes on for, say, three weeks, and then you turn it off. And then perhaps you could turn it on a few years later if you needed to, with your doctor's permission. So that's where we're heading, but no, please don't contact me asking for any treatments just

yet. Well, this sounds amazing, Dr. Sinclair. We wish you all the best of luck here. Thanks, Ira. Really appreciate the chance to be on. Davidson, Claire, is a professor in the Department of Genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Med School. That's about all the time we have for this hour. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, Kathleen Davis. B.J. Leiteman composed our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of this program or you would like to share it with other folks, you can ask them to play Science Friday. You'll play it right there on your smart speaker. And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, what questions do you have about the COVID-19 vaccines?

How they work, how they're being distributed. Tell us your questions about coronavirus vaccines. We're going to be doing a whole special hour on this. So please download our Science Friday Voxpop app and tell us what questions do you have about the COVID-19 vaccines? And you can do that wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.