RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory. arstechnica.com/health/2025/...
30.04.2025 18:59
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RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory. arstechnica.com/health/2025/...
Whooping cough cases are rising, and doctors are bracing for another tough year. There have been 8,485 cases reported so far in 2025, according to preliminary data from the CDC. That’s twice as many cases as this time last year.
apnews.com/article/whoo...
It’s a mess inside NIH right now, and the staff needs public support and help. The top of NIH has been lopped off, with almost all senior leadership, from former acting director Larry Tabak to head of HR Julie Berko, removed via forced retirements or RIFs. Thousands of staff, from grants program officials to fellows to scientists, have been removed via possibly illegal means, and are not working. Morale is uneven. In a personal conversation earlier this week, one senior employee said to me “NIH is dead right now. Unless things change dramatically soon, NIH is finished as a funder of high-quality science.” Scientists go through a lot of rejection in a career, and so they are resilient. Thanks to that resilience, some NIH’ers are keeping hold of the mission of supporting US science, staying positive, and rolling with the punches. But there are widespread fears the agency is in a state of collapse.
Final point here: this post is from an anonymous NIH employee, and it feels critical to raise these voices precisely because the Trump administration has silenced credible NIH officials and their leadership is not representing them.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
Public outreach: Get word to the public about how Musk and Trump are blocking NIH from funding important cures for disease. Tell the public what Republicans are planning. Talk about how rescission or reconciliation can write into law the cuts that Musk and Trump have created using underhanded and illegal means. Consider recording a short video for social media. Some groups can help you do this, groups like Science Homecoming, and InvestNScience. Congressional outreach: Yes, even if you have only Democratic Congressional representation it is still important to reach out to them. Call, visit, and pressure your Democratic Senators to use their procedural tools, like objecting to unanimous consent, to stop Senate business until the NIH interference — the cancer cure interference — is stopped. Democrats can and should do far more. Sen. Cory Booker’s one-day speech drove attention; Sen. Chris van Hollen’s trip to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia did too. More Senate Democrats should be doing things that are not business as usual. The same holds true for House Democrats: they can be doing more and you can read this playbook to them. Pressure your Republican Senators and Representatives. Probably the best way to create pressure is to go to the media: go to a townhall and ask a question that gets out to TikTok or YouTube. Or write to your local paper. Visit them and their staffers too, and push them to act.
What can you do? Make noise.
The ask is “Leave NIH funding at last year’s (FY24) level. No DOGE cuts. No recission to codify cuts. Hands off NIH.”
If they are going to vote to cut cancer research, lets make that clear.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
New at Can We Still Govern: An anonymous NIH employee maps out the GOP budget gameplan to permanently gut our most important science agency.
Impoundment, delay and red tape will create artificial "savings" that become the new benchmark for NIH budgets.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
What if the reference human genome had been paywalled? Yesterday I heard genomics pioneer Bob Waterston tell of a Perkin-Elmer CEO who envisioned a pay-for-access genome that would have smothered the incredible recent progress in biotechnology.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/what-if-th...
Do you have suggestions for how to write effective comments to proposed rules?
The notice and COMMENT PERIOD OPENED TODAY AND CLOSES MAY 23.
Anyone who would like to register an objection or comment should go to this page and click on the green “public comment” button at the top:
www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...
6/n
In Missouri legislators introduced a bill that would require any meat from livestock treated with mRNA vaccines to be labeled as a "gene therapy product." Fortunately the bill died.
www.riverfronttimes.com/news/critics...
Again, cancelling NSF & other federal competitive grants in higher education is massive contract breaking which undermines the most basic tenets of the rule of law & property rights in a democratic society.
What if LLMs could “read” & “write” biology? 🤔
Introducing C2S‑Scale—a Yale and Google collab: we scaled LLMs (up to 27B!) to analyze & generate single‑cell data 🧬 ➡️ 📝
🔗 Blog: research.google/blog/teachin...
🔗 Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The image seems to suggest Trump leaked from a lab
ai.stanford.edu/postdoctoral...
Postdoc candidates with strong expertise in AI for bio should apply for this new Stanford SAIL fellowship. We encourage applicants who would like to work with multiple SAIL faculty (we are part of SAIL as well). Come join us
How completely lacking in patriotism do you need to be to write that dek?
A disturbing, but alas, not surprising, report from the Washington Post.
[Gift link]
wapo.st/4jtCPdw
🚨I could not be more excited to share our new preprint on saturation genome editing of the small nuclear RNA (snRNA) RNU4-2:
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
A super fun collaboration with incredible duo @gregfindlay.bsky.social @joachimdejonghe.bsky.social from @crick.ac.uk
🧬🖥️🩺
🧵1/12
I am looking forward to spending the next year learning about 1st millennium Arabic and Islamic literature:
And prosecute those who broke the law.
Drosophila biologists still going strong with the best gene names in the business:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40215271/
Interesting to read the above side-by-side with Google's new AGI safety paper:
blog.google/technology/g...
Here's an interesting thought-instead of speculating about super-intelligent AGI, let's think about the implications of artificial intelligence as *normal* tech.
New essay from the authors of AI Snake Oil:
knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...
A very smart take on what "smarter than human AI" really means, from the inimitable @glichfield.bsky.social
"Stop trying to compare AI to humans, or to anything from the movies, and instead just keep asking: What does it actually do?" www.bloomberg.com/opinion/feat...
Nobody starting a career in STEM in 2025 should skip learning about AI. Take a formal class if you can, but anyone can reinvent themselves to work with AI intelligently. I have some suggestions for how to teach yourself, even if your math is limited:
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/how-to-tea...
I tell my kids they'll need to reinvent themselves during their careers. In grad school I hadn't written code since high school and worked in a lab with only two computers. A few of us taught ourselves Perl because it seemed useful and now 40% of my work is computational.
And now it's AI:
A 2024 open access review of recent progress towards ASO treatment of cancer. The real challenge is figuring out how to deliver RNA or DNA to the proper tissue. The challenge is being met.
doi.org/10.1016/j.om...
ASOs (antisense oligonucleotides) have some enormous advantages when it comes to drug design. Nucleic acids are easily 'programmable' in a way that chemical drugs are not and can thus tackle supposedly undruggable targets.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/treating-d...
Imagine being this family 100 years ago–4 of 8 siblings died of spinal muscular atrophy as babies. Within the past decade, we learned how to cure this disease. One of the treatments, ASOs, is being brought to bear on cancer.
Some reading for the weekend:
Bad AI will be worse than p-hacking, same genes but different mutation patterns in autism and cancer, open datasets for drug development, and a couple more.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/this-weeks...
Yes, more books like this:
OK, so this year won't be a total loss:
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/b...