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Comment by drewvolpe | Hacker News Reader

NASA just successfully sent a helicopter to Mars. We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months and had it through FDA trials in under a year. CAR T cell therapies (3 FDA approved and more coming) are changing how we treat cancer. There's amazing technology all around you.

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Life sciences is about the only area of science that has promising new technology coming out of it. Almost every other area is incremental.

Nuclear reactor design: mostly already considered by the Navy in the 50s and 60s.

Space Exploration: Space shuttle was reusable too. Rockets that could land were demonstrated in the 90s IIRC (admittedly SpaceX improved on this quite a bit).

Electric/Renewable Powered Aircraft: Soviet Union had a hydrogen powered airliner.

I'm not saying the new stuff isn't impressive. It is and those small improvements add up to a lot, but it's not revolutionary in the way a jet engine or a nuclear reactor was.

We as a species were sending stuff to Mars and to Venus (which imho is a lot more interesting than Mars) back in the '70s and '80s, not that much novelty in recent events (even though I must admit the helicopter gimmick was interesting, until the novelty very quickly worn off, that is).

> had it through FDA trials in under a year.

That was by political decision, at least that is my understanding.

Fun fact: the mRNA vaccines were developed in about 2 weeks after the publication of the SARS2 DNA sequence. (At least the Pfizer/BioNTech one was.)

Was it though?

The science that made this possible was in the works for decades, and it took Moderna and BioNTech many many years to get the technology right.

So that's many years of effort with the stated goal of getting a vaccine out the door fast when it's needed. But there was relatively little "science" left to be done when COVID struck.

The only interesting aspect here are the logistics to make vaccines in the required quantities, and honestly it's not looking too great, considering where we are with vaccinations. Though maybe it just wouldn't have been possible to make doses any quicker, regardless of effort.

Interesting. You are arguing with something I've never said. I was just responding to the comment above that said "We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months". That indeed those few months were about two weeks. Of course, given all the preexisting research that went into both creating the mRNA platform and the coronavirus vaccines in general. (The spike protein can be produced by itself due to the replacement of two amino acids, which allows it to keep its shape without being on the surface of the actual virus. This is a 3-4 year old result.)

So, yeah, I'm fully aware of it, I was just responding to the comment above, using the same context. (The very point of the mRNA vaccines is that they are a generic and easy to use platform where we can get a vaccine candidate very quickly.)

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