Science In Action

US Health Secretary RFK Jr’s call to retract a study on childhood vaccines is resisted by the journal. Also antibiotics get designed by AI, and a new way for stars to die. A study focussing on Danish childhood vaccination data has attracted the US Secretary for Health’s anger, as RFK jr calls for the journal in which it was published, the Annals of Internal Medicine, to retract it. The Editor, Christine Laine, talk to Science in Action about the strengths and challenges of observational studies. The cuts to prestigious US federal science funded research continue, as last week it was announced that $500 million funding for future mRNA vaccines would be withdrawn. Barney Graham, one of the pioneers in the field and prominent during the Covid vaccines, argues that the research will still happen, though maybe not in the US, as mRNA has become a fundamental area of global research. Meanwhile, strides are being made in the field of synthetic biology as Jim Collins and colleagues at MIT and Harvard have used AI to