When thinking about science Camus' thoughts are prescient; "For methods imply metaphysics; uncosciously they disclose conclusions that they often claim not to know yet"
For immuno folks: asking a question through an immunological lens will lead to immunological conclusions - not quite objective.
Congrats Sarah! Vancouver is lucky to have you. Hope the transition goes smoothly.
I often wonder with these stats how much privilege comes into play. A doctorate lowers your earning potential significantly while you’re in it. This is a risk that is usually taken if the person has at (least some) financial backing. Such risks are less likely to be taken by the less privileged.
providencemag.com/2025/07/chri...
Fantastic article.
"Writing shapes people, and people shape societies, especially democratic ones."
Learning to write well is a skill that manifests in positive ways beyond communication. For Lasch and Orwell, sloppy writing produces dishonest societies.
It likely will unless course is changed fast. Science adapts sociological trends just more slowly.
Article reference limits discourage adequate scientific discussion and are counterproductive. Building strong arguments cannot be done with one citation of a review. Authors should also be appropriately credited for the work they have done, even if published a long time ago.
🎉 Over the moon to share the first paper from my lab!! We discovered an unexpected role for the cytokine OSM in lung epithelial homeostasis and repair. 🧵 1/n www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Really enjoy the intersection of math and statistics with immunology. Great work.
Was a pleasure to write this journal club spotlight on the following excellent preprint from Neetu Srivastava, Xiaoxiao Wan and colleagues. Please be sure to check out their excellent work here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Sounds nice in theory, but how can the student be competitive for post docs and later, ECR awards without publications? It’s just setting students up for career failure in the current world. If you want to change science, change uni hiring practices first.
Congratulations! The preprint was already fantastic - can’t wait to read the full story.
Really couldn't be more proud to have the last chapter of my PhD finally out in publication at @cellpress.bsky.social.
We looked at the mechanisms behind how the developing gut microbiota in newborns plays a role in education of the pulmonary immune response against respiratory viruses.
Also such uncertainty is why you always want to show a phenotype in multiple different ways.
I think you’re touching on exactly what makes science difficult; dealing with uncertainty. If the validation is scientifically sound do you scrap the entire paper just because of omics stats? Get rid of the omics data only? If we do this we’re depriving the reader of crucial foundational info…
Stats cutoffs are anyway arbitrarily set. Just because there’s a significance with a conservative test doesn’t mean there’s a biologically relevant effect (or size) and vice versa. Stats are a tool for discovery and if they have validated their findings with functional experiments I see no issue.
I am very excited to share our article on IFNg, stroma and disease tolerance during intestinal helminth infection published today in Cell. This work was lead by the amazing @susanwestfall.bsky.social and supported by many international collaborators.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Having had a bad clavicle fracture 6 months ago, two operations, and too many X-rays (all for $0!) I am super grateful for the ortho team @sinaihealth.bsky.social in Toronto for their exceptional care. Proud to be 🇨🇦, and I hope we as a nation push even more $ into the medical sphere.
But I 100% agree on the importance with playing with the data in a less hypothesis-driven way. Insightful article.
Walk before you run. This is great advice for scientists that have been devising hypothesis driven experiments for a while, but likely a bad place to start as a new trainee. Making hypotheses, and performing control driven science is a crucial fundamental skill to have.
Timeless poem.
Featured Article: Cross-kingdom-mediated detection of protozoa
NLRP6 regulates colonic mucus secretion upon intestinal protozoan infection. NLRP6 does not directly sense Tritrichomonas but Bacteroides-derived sphingolipids enriched during infection
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
Highly recommended read!
Reliance on AI to solve problems without having any conception of the solution approach has elements of praying to a deity.
NEW @preprintclub.bsky.social Journal Club by Jennifer Ahn & @jengommerman.bsky.social highlighting a @biorxiv-immuno.bsky.social paper by @arimolofskylab.bsky.social, Jeanne Paz and colleagues that reports a role for IFNg in protecting against seizures after traumatic brain injury
www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...
Super happy to have contributed to this work led by the skyless Dr. Nate Winsor in our lab published in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social! If you're interested in learning more about gut protozoa, bacteria, and mucus, be sure to give it a read!
A somewhat expected consequence of the rise in scientific publishing (oftentimes dubious papers), is that seminal papers, especially those prior to 2005-ish are much harder to find without specific PubMed queries. Does anyone have any tips?
This is insane - transplantation of genetically modified pig heart into human as a treatment for heart failure. Despite the patient succumbing to antibody-mediated graft rejection, there were encouraging postoperative improvements.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
That’s another interesting perspective. It shows that the question is more important than the answer - science, economics, sociology, morality and philosophy all coming into play as soon as we pass the surface.
Wrt the second question it’s important to consider that healthcare burden and taxpayer cost would likely be significantly lessened however with the latter pill. I see it as boiling down to collectivism vs individuality. Impossible to answer.
I love this idea but seems difficult to practice. How do we narrow down on what’s different about an outlier when samples have already been collected and we have knowledge of the outlier only in hindsight?
