Tim Rhoads

Two ASBMB members pose for a photo inn front of the U.S. Capitol. They are holding ASBMB folders.

Four ASBMB members pose for a photo inn front of the U.S. Capitol.

Three people pose for a photo in front of Tim Kaine's office during the 2026 ASBMB Hill Day.

Four people pose for a photo after a meeting during the 2026 ASBMB Hill Day.

Hill Day is a wrap! Huge thanks to all our members who joined us on Capitol Hill to advocate for strong federal support for basic research.
#ASBMBAdvocates #ScienceServesUsAll

I was on Capitol Hill today with @asbmb.bsky.social urging lawmakers to support strong federal investment in
scientific research and training. Also to support : predictable and sustained funding.
#ASBMBAdvocates #ScienceServesUsAll

My colleague, who is part of our Capitol Hill team with ASBMB advocating for basic science, keeps running into students that she trained in her classroom who are here advocating for the American Medical Association! So fun to see the impact of her training in real 3D! #ASBMBAdvocates

photo of 3 people in front of mark pocan’s capitol office

Photo of 3 people in front of Tammy Baldwin’s capitol hill office

US Capitol building

Great day of science advocacy! #ASBMBadvocates #ScienceServesUsAll
@asbmb.bsky.social @uwmadisonrna.bsky.social

#ScienceServesUsAll

Thank you to our Wisconsin senators and representatives staffs for meeting with us! #ASBMBAdvocates

A group of more than 50 scientists pose for a photo in front of the U.S. Capitol.

Next up: 120 meetings with congressional staff on Capitol Hill to discuss why strengthening federal support for basic research is essential for U.S. competitiveness. NIH and NSF investments drive innovation!
#ASBMBAdvocates #ScienceServesUsAll
www.asbmb.org/advocacy

Folks from @rnasociety.bsky.social advocating for basic science research funding #ASBMBAdvocates @uwmadisonrna.bsky.social @cassandrahayne.bsky.social

Participants of the 2026 ASBMB March Hill Day listen to a presentation about the event.

ASBMB Hill Day preparation continues! This evening we welcomed more than 50 scientists from across the country who will be heading to Capitol Hill tomorrow for meetings with lawmakers to advocate on behalf of biomedical research funding! #ASBMBAdvocates

“So this ‘mechano-antiviral response system’ (MARS) may well be a type of innate immunity that we have been completely overlooking, and there may well be ways to leverage it to our advantage.”

I think one of the things that separates us from the other -- I'll even say the other science agencies, you know, [inaudible] original vision for a science agency, science as an endless frontier, that's not actually what got implemented. He proposed that, and then a lot of the other agencies appeared. There was phenomenas an when we were envisioned. There was no -- NASA. There was no DOD -- DOD existed or the Department of war existed, but you know, NSF has evolved overtime, and as Simon said, we're not the only agency that funds basic research, but there are certain things, like we're the one that covers the broadest space. We cover very large, a very large scope. And we also make those long term investments. When's the book? Usefulness of useless things or whatever it is. Like we make those kinds of long term bets that pay off big time. And those are the kinds of things when we talk about people in the administration and they're like, yeah, why don't you just [inaudible] we're actually investing in the future. Sorry, you're talking about quantum and talking about AI. We can have a conversation about whether we think there's an AI bubble, but we're investing in the things that are going to be the stuff that you're going to be talking about five years from now, ten years from now, 15 years from now, and if you stop what we do, you're not going to have that continuing flow of this sort of stuff. There's been a broad acceptance of that.

Here is an illuminating response from a November town hall where Stone talks about what makes NSF unique and why it matters. (Forgive some of the formatting and typos; it's auto-transcribed.)

kill the imposter syndrome in you head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they're also using chat gpt to do it

Anyways.

Rising Stars in Metabolism Symposium Join us for Rising Stars in Metabolism Symposium at Van Andel Institute Stay informed about exciting upcoming events and activities.

Hot meeting alert!! 🚨🚨 @vai.org is hosting Rising Stars and Horizons in Metabolism, a new format, 2 day symposium highlighting both established and up and coming leaders in Metabolic research. Check it out and register here: www.vai.org/event/rising...

Excited to share our study "Estropausal gut microbiota transplant improves measures of ovarian function in adult mice" ♀️🐁💩 led by Dr. #MinhooKim, published online today at @nataging.nature.com, where we describe surprising findings on the gut/ovary axis. 🧪🖥️🧬. A 🧵1/11 www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Super excited to present out work at @mitotalks.bsky.social this Thursday!! Hope to see you there!

UNC-CH Will ‘Scrap’ New Recording Policy, Chancellor Says The move comes less than three weeks after the controversial rules were enacted.

Congrats to @ncaaup.bsky.social & all who fought against this surveillance policy that would've allowed admin to hijack microphones in the classroom for secret recordings.

This move would've chilled classroom discussion & suppressed students' willingness to ask questions & take intellectual risks.

NSF officials break silence on how AI and quantum now drive agency grantmaking Leaders acknowledge White House role in controversial moves

The National Science Foundation is systematically being converted to the National AI and Quantum Research Foundation.

“I see it as the administration exerting political control over what has traditionally been NSF’s ability to fund the best science.”

Functional nutrient-genetic profiling reveals biotin and FBXW7 are essential to bypass glutamine addiction Lisci et al. present a unified model revealing how cells escape glutamine addiction, a metabolic vulnerability of several cancers. Combining systematic genetic and nutrient screens, they show that bio...

Our story on #FBXW7 and #biotin in #glutamine_addiction is now peer-reviewed and published in Molecular Cell! Heroic work led by the very first postdoc of the lab @miriamlisci.bsky.social. Have a look!

www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

These are “low enrollment” majors but the classes are regularly at capacity. They changed the funding structure a few years ago here, switching the allocation from course enrollments to majors then blamed these departments for a structural, top-down change. This is entirely a political choice.

🏫 Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education: Brian Donovan
🎓 GSA Early Career Medal: @mexpositoalonso.bsky.social, @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social
🌎 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal: Judith Kimble, @uwbiochem.bsky.social
🔬 George W. Beadle Award: Aaron Mitchell, @universityofga.bsky.social

2/3🧵

Should biology put complexity first? The dictum “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” poses a problem for biology. How simply can it be told without doing dama…

Should biology put complexity first? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... - excellent essay by @philipcball.bsky.social. I would add epistasis to polygenicity and pleiotropy as a ubiquitous and fundamental phenomenon, not some optional complication that we can try to account for afterwards

Will self-driving ‘robot labs’ replace biologists? Paper sparks debate AI-driven autonomous robots are coming to biology laboratories, but researchers insist that human skills remain essential.

A single grad student achieves 600% improvement in 4 months, then an entire lavishly funded team achieves a further 40% improvement in 6 months.

Nature says the latter has "eclipsed" the former.

This is so dumb.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This morning’s course on studying protein-protein interactions is well on its way at #USHUPO2026! I just wrapped up my talk on AP-MS, and now Lan Huang is talking about crosslinking MS. This afternoon Ling Hao will be talking about proximity labeling as well. @us-hupo.org

Last month, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin approved a proposal to establish a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence funded by private corporations and philanthropy. Mnookin said the move was a response to the inevitable creep of artificial intelligence into all disciplines of academia. Rather than reject AI, she envisioned a university that capitalized on this change by making artificial intelligence a "hub" connecting the humanities to computer science.

On the first day of my economics elective this spring, my professor said we would be expected to use NotebookLM to pass his class. He had lengthened the coding assignments so that they would be doable only with the help of AI. The reading assignments were longer, too: ten 40-page papers per week, which he asked us to feed into AI for a summary rather than read ourselves. When it came to lectures, he told us to simply upload the slides to AI and ask it to teach us whatever he failed to explain properly in class.

BLEAK. Bleak. I’d been paying attention to Columbia selling out its governance to the Trump admin, not so much its stance on AI.
www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2026...

Thrilled to share our latest work "Recessive PPTC7 deficiency triggers excessive mitophagy to cause a severe inborn error of metabolism with hypomyelinating leukodystrophy" - a collaborative effort documenting the first cases of PPTC7 mutations in humans. 1/n
www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...

A big day for the lab! Huge congratulations to the newly minted Dr. Jerry Wei @lianjiejerrywei.bsky.social for successfully defending his thesis! 🎓🥳🎉

Reflections on my 30+ years in mitochondrial research,
in @cp-trendsbiochem.bsky.social

linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii...

Join us on Monday, February 23 for Biochemistry Colloquium with Traci Hall. Hall leads the Macromolecular Structure Group
at the NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and their lab focuses on mRNA stability and translation. More info: today.wisc.edu/events/view/...

Pleased to share the final version of this behemoth of a paper, now finally published. I guess I can retire now?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

More functional data, many thousands of words removed, and a few other updates from last year's preprint.

Slide: Researchers and AI: Survey Findings Text: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Researchers and Al: Survey Findings aby Boomers & Gen X have a larger proportion of 'Pioneers', whereas Millennials have a larger proportion of 'Challengers' % of each researcher profile per generation *bar graph: baby boomers and Gen X both described as 8% “challengers”; for millennials, the number is 17%* It should be noted that 'generation' was not asked directly; it was calculated using reported age. The sample is smaller as the 40-49 years' age category cut across the generation bands and was therefore excluded from this reporting. The remaining groups were categorized into broad generational bands using the following age categories: Millennials: Up to 39 years Generation X: 50 - 59 years Baby Boomers: 60 - 79 years Silent Generation: 80+ years N=1,416 14

Slide: Researchers and AI: survey findings. Text: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Researchers and Al: Survey Findings Early Career Researchers have a larger proportion of 'Challengers' % of each researcher profile per career stage *bar graph giving breakdown of percentage of early-career vs. mid- and late-career academic attitudes. 16% or ECRs are designated “challengers” vs 12% (mid) and 8% (late)* Generally across career stages there are similar proportions of each researcher profile, the exception being a larger proportion of 'Challengers' in the Early Career Research category, compared to other career stages. Career Stage was based on self-reported categorization of 'early, 'mid", or late. N=2,088 15

Interesting survey on attitudes toward AI among academics. One thing that struck me: millennials (vs Gen X and boomers) and early-career researchers are *more* likely to distrust AI. fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...