cutting pure science to prioritize applications is fundamentally like asking farmers not to waste time producing grain, cheese, and tomatoes and focus on making pizzas

🧵 Every entry in this series featured science that outsiders called ridiculous. This one is different. Here, the scientific establishment itself said it would fail. 🔬

🧠 Memory held even where the plaques never cleared. In an aged Alzheimer's model, boosting oligodendrocytes kept spatial working memory at wild-type levels (56.7±2.5% vs 39.5±2.1%, P=0.0004), without lowering amyloid. 🧵

One current pulse drives a single cortical column in a mouse. The same waveform in a paralyzed human BCI user yields a different percept, or none. That cross-species gap is the problem BRIDGE-STIM 2027 is built to close. 🧵

A statement from the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee on the proposed OMB regulations. www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majorit... 1/3

Absolutely this. Bell Labs was very productive when I was a kid. But they, as a monopoly, basically had the ability to tax the entire US population. Moreover, while they published or otherwise disseminated some of their findings, they kept some just for A T & T.

🧬In 2001, a member of the National Academy of Sciences told my 400-person lecture to watch Jennifer Doudna, because she'd probably win a Nobel. What he didn't say: taxpayers were already paying for the work that would get her there. 🧵

🧠 NSF just funded BRIDGE-STIM 2027 (Award #2624028, CBET). May 17-19, Pittsburgh. The workshop assembles experimentalists running intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) in mice, NHPs, and humans, addressing the cross-species translation gap stalling sensorimotor BCI restoration.

📊 NIH NOT-OD-26-086 proposes capping RPGs per PI at 2, 3, or 4. The cap counts grants rather than dollars controlled, so an MPI on a five-site U19 spends a full slot for a fraction of a budget while a sole PI spends one slot for an entire R01.

⚡ A brain implant delivers a microsecond pulse to cortex, and the textbook answer is that the neuron fires. The biology turns out to be far richer, which matters for every patient feeling through a prosthetic hand, suppressing a seizure, or treating depression by stimulation.

Roughly half of intracortical microelectrodes lose recording capability within a year of implantation. The B.I.O.N.I.C. Lab at Pitt is hiring a postdoc to attack the mechanism on two parallel grant-funded threads. 🧵 (1/7)

🔬 Your tax dollars once paid a physicist whose own colleagues told him he was wasting the university's money. In 1951, Charles Townes sat on a D.C. park bench and worked out, on the back of an envelope, how to force molecules to release coherent radiation. 🧵 1/5

In 1944, Vannevar Bush handed FDR "Science: The Endless Frontier," arguing federal investment in basic research was a national security requirement. Eighty-two years later, the FY27 NDAA biotech amendments make the same case. 🧵 (1/8)

youtu.be/0UD278aJ-VE?... Thomas Jefferson said, "We must not be afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead." Scientific truth ennobles us. It tells us who we are, where we've been, and where we're going. I believe the truth will only be found when all scientists are free to pursue it.

🌊 High school biology. Teacher plays a clip. Frame one, ATP synthase, the protein that makes ATP from a proton gradient in every cell. Frame two, a water turbine. Nearly identical structures, 14 orders of magnitude apart, identical mechanism. Biology was an engineering system. 🧵

🛩 Every commercial pilot trains on simulators. None earns a license through simulators alone. The simulator is not the airplane. On July 10, 2025, NIH announced future funding opportunities will no longer be issued exclusively for animal models. The shift is now active policy.🧵

🧮 We built a computational model that predicted which electrode channels would fail in human BCI participants before they failed. The mouse data isn't misleading. The biology of failure is the same in humans, and now we can map it.

Your tax dollars once paid a doctor at a VA hospital in the Bronx to study the venom of a poisonous lizard. It produced Ozempic, Wegovy, and a $38.6 billion therapeutic class. 🧵

🧬 In 1995, Katalin Karikó was demoted at UPenn because her grants weren't landing and her papers weren't cited. The mRNA chemistry she developed over the next 20 years (modifying uridine to pseudouridine) became the COVID-19 vaccines and the 2023 Nobel Prize.

🧪 I came up under peer review. The people who built it did not. Senior colleagues told me what it replaced: strong proposals from capable researchers going unfunded, not for weak science, but because the path to money ran through personal proximity to the program officer who held it.

Musk's DOGE "saved" $15 million by cutting a program dedicated to preventing the spread of screwworm. Now, there is an outbreak, and the administration is spending $1 billion of taxpayer funds to combat the preventable outbreak.

🔧 As a kid I was confused and frustrated by school. Japanese and English jumbled together, home unstable. What I could control was small. So I built things: rubber bands, paperclips, then sheet metal and hardwood. Mechanical logic was the one place the world made sense. 🧵

10 years ago, after 10 months of facilities renovation delays, I was finally able to start building my lab.

🔊 Every intervention we've tried to extend BCI lifespan modifies the electrode or delivers a drug. Both work, both carry tradeoffs, new materials bring new failure modes, drugs go systemic with off-target effects. So we asked: what if we redirect the brain's immune response with sound?

Neuroscientist here, who has talked about the US losing science ground to other countries: The biggest problem for generating future cures for brain diseases is the ongoing utter destruction of US basic neuroscience. It’s not about regulation.

Define "Gold Standard Science" without publication, peer review, conferences, journal access, or international collaboration. You can't. Neither can OMB. The proposed 2 CFR rewrite (OMB-2026-0034) requires compliance with it anyway. 🧵

🖖 Star Trek imagined the most capable AI possible. The ship's computer knew everything, computed anything in seconds. It still never had an idea. A human always asked "what if we reroute through the deflector." The computer only ran the consequences. The seed was always human.

Every technology that reshaped medicine in the last 50 years traces to basic science with no obvious application when funded. MRI from spin physics. CRISPR from bacterial immunity. mRNA vaccines from 20 years of lipid nanoparticle work the field called a dead end.

Called it, and I wish I hadn't. Hours after I posted on the OMB grants rule, NIH dropped NOT-OD-26-086: an RFI for a grant cap that is the 2017 Grant Support Index in its crudest form. Count a PI's simultaneous NIH grants, force relinquishment at 2, 3, or 4.

In 2017, NIH proposed capping how much funding any single lab could hold. Senior PIs killed it in a month. The trainees who would have benefited said nothing. OMB-2026-0034 is the same fight. This time you're the target.

🕵️ Your brain's immune system isn't fighting the implant. It's listening to it. The textbook story: immune system sees foreign object, attacks, builds scar. Incomplete. We found microglia monitor what the device does to nearby neurons in real time, then adjust behavior to match. 🧵

In 1981, Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers who walked off the job. The logic held: professional judgment required job protection, and they abandoned the job. Schedule Policy/Career inverts that logic entirely. 🧵

⚛️ In 1925, a 23-year-old on a state-funded university post retreated to a rocky island with hay fever and wrote a paper so strange he wasn't sure it was worth publishing. Schrodinger called it "nonsense." Einstein rejected it. It became the basis of modern technology.

They published it at 412 pages on a Friday afternoon, the slot networks call "take out the trash." OMB-2026-0034 lets political appointees override peer review, ban publication funding, and terminate grants without cause. They gave you 45 days. They're counting on you not reading it.

The FY2027 appropriations fight is entering the House markup right now. If you're a federally funded PI and you haven't contacted your rep's office this cycle, here's a 6-step thread that takes less than 80 minutes to start. 🧵

OMB just published 412 pages in the Federal Register (Docket OMB-2026-0034) giving political appointees authority to terminate any NIH grant, override peer review scores, and block you from publishing with federal funds. Comment period closes ~July 13. Thread 🧵

The government is losing its best lawyers, just as it’s losing its best scientists. For both fields, staying inside the government means hitting up against the ethical standards of the profession. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/u...

⚡ The brain has a thermostat that matches blood flow to neural activity in real time. Chronic electrical stimulation breaks it. The therapeutic stimulation BCIs deliver may be undermining the metabolic environment those devices depend on. 🧵

and they called it a waste of tax dollars back then, too

Vought's daughter takes Trikafta for cystic fibrosis. The CFTR gene was isolated in 1989 with NIH dollars. Every step of the 30-year pipeline was federally funded academic research. His OMB is now strangling the exact work that produced the drug keeping her alive.

🪼 Your tax dollars paid a scientist to squeeze jellyfish through cheesecloth. Osamu Shimomura processed tens of thousands on an NSF grant to understand why they glow. He found a protein that glowed green under UV light. Called it "green protein." Nobody cared. For decades.

The current crisis: What's happening to science in America www.science.org/content/blog...

Excellent summary of how Vought’s proposed rule will destroy science. Please be ready to comment tomorrow, call Congress, tell your friends. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to speak up, that moment is now.

For a clear description of what is in the new OMB grant-making regulations, see elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of... 1/2

Triple the science budget AND fix agency governance. TLDR: Those are the two essential things we must fix in US science. Get the president out of the science agencies, no presidential influence beyond appointment, stop the attacks on the civil service, restore Congressional power and oversight.

🧠 A logic failure that costs the BCI field decades. PI: "mechanism A is sufficient to drive outcome B, here's the intervention experiment." Critic: "you haven't shown A is the only cause, B also depends on C, D, E." PI: "yes, those matter too." Critic: "then your experiment proves nothing."🧵👇

🇺🇸 March 1863. 110k Union battle deaths still ahead. Lee's army positioned to invade the North within weeks. Lincoln signed the charter establishing the National Academy of Sciences anyway.163 years & 31 administrations of both parties later, that charter still works.

🧱 Your brain implant isn't failing at the electrode. It's failing in the blood vessels. The BCI field spent decades on scar tissue and coating chemistry. Our data point 50-100 microns away, inside vessels nobody was monitoring. 🧵

On April 24, the administration dismissed all 22 members of the National Science Board by email. NSB has approved every major NSF expenditure since 1950. Six weeks later, NSF Tech Labs awards of $10-50M/year obligate without that oversight layer in place.