The Trump administration spent 2025 taking a sledgehammer to science, obliterating funding and reshaping agencies like the FDA and the National Institutes of Health through layoffs and restrictive new policies. In a new letter, Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., co-founder of Moderna and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, warns that these actions risk undermining the foundations of science itself to the ultimate detriment of health and biotech innovation in America.
“Skepticism is an important part of the scientific method. Debate about approaches and outcomes is central to how science works,” Afeyan wrote in the Jan. 12 letter. “But what we are seeing is skepticism that has curdled into an across-the-board, corrosive doubt in the scientific method itself.”
That skepticism has manifested in unevidenced attacks on mRNA technology, childhood vaccines and even the food pyramid. But, as a self-described paranoid optimist, Afeyan doesn’t think the administration truly understands the ramifications of its unscientific actions.
“In my mind is a hope that people who are taking these actions may not realize that this is essentially an undoing of the scientific method, not just the scientific output,” Afeyan told Fierce Biotech in an interview. “I believe that if people stop and look at it that way, and realize that we’ve got to keep a highest level of rigor, that it may change.”
Science is built on a process of generating hypotheses, testing those hypotheses with well-controlled experiments, and then analyzing and sharing results before starting the cycle all over again. Ideally, Afeyan said, policy decisions would then be made based on conclusions drawn from resulting scientific evidence.
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“We have plenty of money to deploy to this kind of activity, but the fact that it’s being withheld or directed in other ways—not through a scientific process but rather through a political process—is the thing that I think we have to correct,” he explained to Fierce.
Afeyan highlighted measles as an example of the consequences unscientific policymaking can have. The viral infection was eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but cases have now hit record-high levels for the last several decades.
If the 2,144 U.S. cases recorded over the past year continue to spread for the next few weeks, the country may lose its elimination status, Afeyan wrote.
“The resurgence of measles is not the result of, say, a random genetic mutation. It is the result of choices, policy decisions, to turn our backs on decades of science,” he wrote.
The Trump administration, for its part, has so far held that its actions align with “gold-standard science.” At the time of publication, the Department of Health and Human Services had not responded to a request for comment from Fierce.
China, of course
While Afeyan’s letter begins by outlining the contrast between the Trump administration’s actions and last year’s scientific breakthroughs—such as Gilead Sciences’ twice-yearly HIV preventive lenacapavir, the first ever custom CRISPR gene editing therapy and cross-species organ transplants—the topic inevitably turns to China’s rise as a biotech powerhouse.
“At the same time that some in the U.S. are undermining the scientific method, the Chinese government has been investing heavily in it,” Afeyan wrote. “In just the last decade, China has increased its spending on the scientific method through large-scale research and development by 400-fold.”
America could benefit from taking some pages out of China’s book, Afeyan told Fierce. One example is their ability to rapidly conduct physician-sponsored phase 1 clinical trials.
“The FDA is looking at that very carefully, because we risk being completely uncompetitive in that mode,” he said. “It’s perfectly good to learn from your competition.”
While China “is well on its way to overtaking the United States’ historical lead in biotechnology,” the country is also a potent partner for collaboration, Afeyan adds—as long as both sides play by the same rules.
“Scientists will collaborate with scientists provided that their contributions and their collaboration is acknowledged when it’s published,” he explained. “Similarly, if companies are going to collaborate, or if the government’s going to collaborate, there has to be an understanding that we’re going to follow rules of ownership, intellectual property [and] data.”
Ceding biotech supremacy to China comes with national security risks, weakening America’s ability to respond to biological warfare and the next pandemic, Afeyan wrote.
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And, while China is the current chief adversary for U.S. biotech, it may not always be that way as science becomes more and more global. Afeyan pointed to the subject of his 2025 annual letter, polyintelligence, as a sign that the barrier to entry to the global biopharma industry is lowering. Polyintelligence combines intelligence from humans, nature and machines, and it’s the latter that may prove to be a boon for emerging biotech hubs.
“With data centers and AI centers being established, that is not a far distance to say there may be the opportunity to create more vibrant, more productive biotech clusters,” Afeyan said, calling out Persian Gulf nations like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as examples. He also has his eye on places like Singapore and the U.K., where the regulatory frameworks are more competitive and adaptive to new technologies and models, according to Afeyan.
“Near term, I think people who don’t adopt these things and start competing are going to really be hurting,” he added.
Global science
Afeyan maintains his hopeful mindset even when it comes to Trump’s immigration policies, which have been criticized for violating due process and using extreme violence. America’s rise as a scientific superpower was fueled by immigrants, and Afeyan himself is an “American by choice.” He was born in Beirut before moving to Canada with his family as a teenager, and he eventually earned a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“If the immigration policy, especially H-1B [visas], didn’t exist, you wouldn’t be talking to me,” Afeyan said. “Nor would you be talking to many other founders, CEOs and scientists.”
That said, the Flagship founder doesn’t think the Trump administration is actively trying to undermine America’s foundational pro-immigrant identity.
“Some of our leaders are sons of immigrants, grandsons of immigrants, married to immigrants, and so I really don’t think deep down, their interest is to go after immigration,” Afeyan said. “I think that they’re using blunt tools for what’s otherwise a more precise activity,” which is making sure that “immigration is done legally.”
The U.S. has historically been like the Olympics of science, Afeyan said, where the best and brightest from around the world come to compete against each other and ultimately push science forward. Turning away from the scientific method threatens all the benefits this grand competition brings.
“We risk losing much of the $3.2 trillion the biosciences sector contributes to U.S. GDP every year and the 2.3 million jobs it provides,” he wrote. “And most terrifyingly, we risk our health and that of our loved ones.”
Investing in science, adopting artificial intelligence or subscribing to the scientific method are choices, Afeyan said—ones he thinks the U.S. urgently needs to make.
“Respecting and valuing and therefore relying on facts that are determined based on experimentation with collective skepticism is among the highest achievements humanity has made,” he told Fierce. “And boy, would I like not to regress from that.”
