Letter to the FT that stingingly sums up Brexit and the shit creek we now find ourselves in. A terrible idea (naive, prejudiced and uninformed) that has deeply divided us and left us poorer and less secure… but unwilling to face up to the damage we’ve done to ourselves. While the EU moves on.

A recent modeling study in JAMA showed that if MMR vaccine rates drop 10% (easy to see happen with this), we’re back to 400,000-500,000 cases a year. Our current outbreak is 2,000. This turns the clock back to 1950 🚨🚨🚨

Over the past 5+ years I've had the honor of working with @wsdewitt.github.io @victora.bsky.social and many others on a project to "replay" affinity maturation evolution from a fixed starting point. matsen.group/general/2025...

I'm not going to lie. I find these numbers staggering. Why would you not? Is it not free for NHS frontline workers?

Gonna wallow for a second: I'll share more info tomorrow, but over the last couple weeks, we've finally put our NSF center on ice as we continue to just not get paid and run out of money. I'm just so sad and angry about it. No real "but" at the end of this

Happy to see this work on IG light chains from @e-engelbrecht1.bsky.social in press www.nature.com/articles/s41... How else will germline variation impact the expressed repertoire? Can't wait to see! Thanks to awesome collabs: @williamlees.bsky.social @guryaari.bsky.social @ayeletperes.bsky.social

We are thrilled to announce the first official release (v0.1.8) of #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗿, the successor to one of our flagship tool, #𝗯𝗲𝗱𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀! Based on ideas we conceived of long ago (!), this was achieved thanks to the dedication of Brent Pedersen. 1/n

My carefully considered, nuanced and balanced policy view is that we should tax gambling profits, including sports betting, at like 98% and one executive's kidney per quarter. I'm not sure having every UK mainstreet be three quarters Ladbrokes is good, actually.

My best guess regarding the Ukraine/Russia negotiations is that both sides fully realize there is simply no overlap in the Venn Diagram of what each could accept in terms of conditions and assurances. None. However neither can afford to alienate the US by not engaging in the pantomime of looking.

The UK is losing up to £250m a day in lost tax revenue due to the economic impact of Brexit, House of Commons Library analysis for the Lib Dems suggests. Brexit has blown a "black hole of [up to] £90 billion a year in the public finances" the party says. Even under lower estimates the hit is ~£65bn

Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.

“My NHS colleagues and I weren’t willing to let the bodies pile high in their thousands. Johnson no longer mentions them at all.” Hard hitting and necessary on the government’s covid complacency from @drrachelclarke.com observer.co.uk/news/...

More awful actions by this awful Presidency, as far as I can judge from the post, could not read the firewalled article.

Just an absolutely gutting essay by Tatiana Schlossberg, a writer, mother of two young children, and cousin of RFK Jr who is dying of leukemia. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

We will struggle to explain to future generations how something so transparent and stupid was able to take place youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/arent-you-...

Agree. Coalition of the Willing has to stop deluding itself that after a ceasefire on reasonable terms it will send symbolic forces to Ukraine w US backing. UK, France, Germany, Poland &c must invest whatever it takes to defeat RU in UA, or they will have to fight it, without US help, further West.

The real issue isn’t immigration, it’s the feedback loop: platforms amplify anxiety → voters feel it → politicians chase it → hollow policy follows. Until we break that cycle, we won’t get functional decisions or functional democracy.

It’s gobsmackingly awful. They’ve got a massive majority. They could bring in Levison 2, they could regulate social media, they could make the BBC truly independent, they could close the huge loopholes with foreign influence in party funding, they could bring in electoral reform… Nothing.

Information underpins democracy and the BBC is a key part of that. We need to protect our institutions open.substack.com/pub/christin...

I am no insider but think it's absolutely imperative that we have a publicly funded, public service broadcaster. The BBC is far from perfect and in need of reform (permanent charter, removal of political appointments, mutualisation) - but if we lose it all that fills the gap is billionaires.

The Memphis Belle, flying out of RAF Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire, became the first US bomber to complete 25 missions over Nazi Europe. Her story lives on in Norwich’s Heritage Week exhibition. eastangliabylines.co.uk/lifestyle/hi...

What on earth is going on.

🧬 VDJbase and OGRDB: 3000+ IG/TR samples across human and rhesus macaque with curated AIRR-seq and long-read genomic data. LET'S CHANGE THE WAY WE UTILIZE IG/TR GENOMIC AND REPERTOIRE DATA! @guryaari.bsky.social @williamlees.bsky.social @ayeletperes.bsky.social academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

New manuscript out in NAR! tinyurl.com/4rrbuesn 🧬 VDJbase and OGRDB now support 3000+ IG/TR samples across human and rhesus macaque with curated AIRR-seq and long-read genomic data. From population analysis to precision annotation. @guryaari.bsky.social @cdubsig.bsky.social @williamlees.bsky.social

Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

On Oct 1, 2025, GISAID informed us that they had ended updates to the flat file of SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences and associated metadata that we had used to update Nextstrain analyses since Feb 2020. GISAID's stated rationale was that their "resources are limited". 1/5

Imagine trusting your national space programme in to the hands of someone who is constantly advocating for civil war and and end of democracy in your country.

Yesterday Nigel Farage argued that the UK has failed to grasp Brexit opportunities to deregulate, which his 'pro-business' government would deliver. I've got a piece in the Independent arguing why that is a misreading both of Brexit history and economics. www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexi...

So a weird thing happened to me in Aldi that I cdn't quite place until I was listening to Gabby Bertin talking about choking in porn on the radio this am. (NB: this is 100% not a sex thing). Having the usual polite chitchat with the cashier who is tired from working extra shifts to make £ for xmas..

X is a cesspit led by an unhinged billionaire who is desperately trying to stir up civil war in Britain. Nobody with any sense or decency should be there. No organisations, government departments, or politicians should be there. Everyone who is, is enabling this monster.

Happy to announce the publication of our work exploring under-appreciated genetic diversity in the human IGHC region. Awesome work by @uddalok.bsky.social. So grateful for our amazing co-authors. @williamlees.bsky.social @guryaari.bsky.social @ayeletperes.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

For over 20 years, the mouse model organism has helped scientists uncover the biology behind human health and disease. But the mouse reference genomes still have missing pieces. The first collection of telomere-to-telomere mouse genomes are now available for two key mouse strains. 🧬💻

📢 We are announcing the Adaptive Immune Profiling Challenge 2025! Can you predict immune state labels from adaptive immune receptor repertoires? 💰 $10,000 prize pool! 🗓️ Launches Nov 5 on @kaggle.com More Info: uio-bmi.github.io/adaptive_imm...

Boris Johnson says at the inquiry "it was slow to dawn on government generally about the full horror of of Covid." Why? Why was it so slow to dawn on the government what could happen? That slowness cost lives and livelihoods at a grand scale.

Serious questions for the Wellcome Trust and Wellcome Leap to answer here. Allocating $50m to microbiome pseudoscience is bad enough. But things get alarmingly murky when you notice that the Program Director is working on commercial microbiomics products.

#A_NewHope ✊

Anti-BCMA CAR-T therapy in patients with progressive multiple sclerosis: Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

So proud to be working for a company that's helping build a better Internet arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/i...

The simple fact is that the Government is going to have to find a way of rebuilding local government finances systematically. The decay of public realm and social infrastructure is deeply corrosive of public trust. Everyday, people can see the state not working all around them.

This deserves more attention than it has received. Gove: "we were too anxious as a government to secure those deals in order to show that Brexit was working". Exactly as so many of us warned at the time, and as the government denied at the time. www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/country-and-...

Our latest research shows: Tory voters are now more than twice as likely to consider Brexit a failure for the UK (46%) compared to a success (22%). https://leftfootforward.org/2025/10/even-tory-voters-say-brexit-has-failed-and-damaged-uk-economy-poll-finds/

A high-resolution, unbiased analysis of the cellular immune response to Epstein-Barr virus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.09.681317v1

I #AGREE "Functional characterization and transcriptomic mapping of T cells remain #incomplete without knowledge of their #clonal #antigenic #specificities. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This article manages to name her husband before it names… her.

Why the mathematics used in economics for decades needs a rethink, according to Tim Harford: on.ft.com/3KrvyP8

“I don’t see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in his bed before he goes to sleep.” A publisher rejecting Proust. Every academic - “Can you really do that properly in a mere 30 pages?”

Turns out...just like in the antibody heavy chain repertoire, germline variants in the immunoglobulin lambda and kappa loci influence the composition of light chain B cell receptors! Way to go Eric @e-engelbrecht1.bsky.social !!!! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint from our group in collaboration with the awesome Prof. Ranjan Sen (NIH). We show that IGH polymorphisms establish inter-individual differences in the pro-B antibody repertoire that persist into the naive B cell pool. Oscar L. Rodriguez is killing it! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New BCR reconstruction tool for scRNA-seq: assembles full heavy & light chains and annotates constant regions. Check it out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #scRNAseq #immunology