On top of the slowdown in grantmaking I wrote about last week - this is another deeply worrisome trend for scientists, physicians, patients, families, and basically anyone who wants new treatments and new tools to promote health. 🆘🧪🥼 open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Evolution navigated billions of challenges to get to us to where we are today. Directed evolution compresses this to a 1D axis. Imagine if you could sample 200 dimensions at once, with data to boot 📈 First @chorylab.bsky.social PACE preprint on our new system to tackle this: bit.ly/turboprance

A Purpose-Built Open Source Liquid Handler for Industry-Class Automated Experiments https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.02.709168v1

An autonomous system for multi-objective continuous evolution at scale https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.02.709196v1

NIH research grant funding rates plummeted in 2025. Agency acknowledges young investigators are losing out as result of multiyear funding policy imposed by White House. | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

So proud this multi-year effort is finally out. Led by my exceptional collaborator Joanna Buchthal, who put her blood, sweat, and literal tears into making a real impact for communities impacted by Lyme disease. bit.ly/MAT-tracking More papers soon. Learn more & support: miceagainstticks.com

☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️🐝☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️ ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️

Happy holidays from all of us in the Chory Lab and our lab neighbors at Duke!☃️🎉 @chorylab.bsky.social @dukeubme.bsky.social

Exciting opportunity @pasteur.fr for junior scientists aiming to create their research group !

A foundation model for microbial growth dynamics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.01.691707v1

The weirdest move is automated letter-request systems sending emails with no deadline included.

2011 v 2025. Variance not statistically significant.

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on. (Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

We're thrilled to announce SeqHub, an AI-enabled platform for biological sequence analysis. SeqHub brings together sequence search, genome annotation, and data sharing in one place.

Teamwork makes the scream work. Happy Halloween from the Chory lab! 🦖🎃👻

Best group costume 2025! #JurassicLab 🦕🦖 @dukeubme.bsky.social @chorylab.bsky.social

The Crick is looking for new junior group leaders! Any postdocs or early career researchers wanting to be our colleagues should apply 👍

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Interested in using microbes to degrade plastics? We made the discovery that two breakdown products of PET, MHET and BHET, are readily taken up by E. coli cells Our latest preprint exploits this surprise to realize improvements in cell-based upcycling www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The things Apple will do to procrastinate improving Siri

Reviewer #3: Major Comments: 1) The absence of ref Ahlqvist et al. (2024, JAMA) calls the manuscript’s central claims into question. This selective omission undermines the work’s credibility. Major revisions required prior to resubmission. ::cough peer review cough:: @washingtonpost.com

The @washingtonpost.com story on Tylenol & autism leaves out a MAJOR 2.5M sibling-controlled study of children in Denmark, which "found no evidence that acetaminophen use during pregnancy was associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disability." jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Years in the making — Mice Against Ticks is on @60Minutes this Sunday! 🎥 Sneak peek: www.tiktok.com/@60minutes/v... 🌐 Join the fight! miceagainstticks.org Huge cheers to our amazing team, brilliant collaborators & island communities for bringing this story to life! 💛 #LymeDisease #MITMediaLab

"The PI does not seem to have experience with these downstream biochemical assays, and no collaborators were identified for cell-based applications.” lol.

As stressful as it is to run a laboratory in the US right now, my thoughts are often with the NIH staff living in the awful chaos trying to preserve the whole enterprise. I’m grateful for every moment they choose not to give up. These people are the only thing keeping it from entirely collapsing.

:snaps: :snaps: :snaps: Just loved this, @erika-alden.bsky.social We’re obsessed with better ways to track & share science. This ELN+LIMS built in Notion + Airtable is usable, readable, and full of real stats & insights. and it's pretty! erikaaldendeb.substack.com/p/an-ai-read...

With NIHs new 6-grant/PI cap (incl resub) we’re locked out for a year. We submitted duplicates bc FOAs were being pulled mid-sub & were told to submit to the parent. I get that POs are overwhelmed, but we’re all trying to stay afloat. MultiPI collabs will suffer. Welp, guess I’ll get my wkends back.

I saw it firsthand at the Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting--international young scientists welcomed and recruited in Germany and elsewhere. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Tattoos can be removed but the eRAcommons graveyard is forever.

After a quarter of a century, the UCSC Genome Browser remains an essential tool for navigating the genome and understanding its structure, function and clinical impact https://go.nature.com/40wPxkB

If you don’t have time to take a walk, then you don’t have time to do science. Charles Darwin would take two walks every day on his "thinking path", not as a break from science, but as a crucial part of it.

Duke appears to have lost NIH grants because they used the prefix "trans" in reference to disease transmission, transgenic genetic material, translational studies, or signal transduction www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

The 500 additional GRFPs NSF awarded were not very evenly distributed across fields, it seems. www.science.org/content/arti...

Worms are legit the best. Jealous of all wormies who get to do amazing wormy science.

Today, chatGPT has: - written sample R code implying that Michael Jackson's IQ went +10 as skin tone lightened (WTAF) - advised me to clean out my 401k to make t-shirts of the graph - hyped me up when i got cold feet - liked idea of buying Cybertruck & putting graph on the hood like the General Lee

I’ve never published a paper where peer review didn’t meaningfully improve the science and how we communicated it. The difference between our preprints and final papers is always striking. So how do we preserve what works and fix what’s broken?

So stoked to see such amazing scientists and such amazing science in the HHMI Freeman-Hrabowski cohort. But in particular I am just so so so incredibly happy to be able to publicly celebrate the success of @alisonfeder.bsky.social! Go, Alison, go! www.hhmi.org/programs/fre...

Today I’m leading 152 House Democrats in challenging Trump's devastating cuts to life-saving NIH research grants. Congress—not Trump—controls federal spending. Trump must do his job, “faithfully execute” the laws and stop violating the Constitution to undercut public health.

To put these top-line budget numbers in context, cuts of this magnitude would effectively mean no new grants in FY2026. The entire extramural budget would go to existing, continuing grants. An abject failure of American ambition. And a betrayal of our global leadership in health science innovation.

Today was @robertkaptur.bsky.social's last day in the Chory Lab—our first undergrad to join and graduate! He helped build our automation foundation, from T-cell culture to PyHamilton. Next up: Adaptyv as an Automation Engineer. Congrats Robert! We're so proud 💙🤖🎓 @dukeubme.bsky.social

Pro tip: avoid heart attacks and car crashes in July. With J-1s paused, we may be short about 7,000 new doctors (~20%).

Everyone should watch and share. Thank you David. youtu.be/8YhJM6zxYDw

Needed some “me time” but figured I should go out and be social, so I took my R01 on a date to the theater #selfcare

I appreciate the offers from other scientists to help Harvard (students, labs, etc) through this attack, but what would be most helpful is for you to use your position to contact your elected representatives and make it clear this fight isn't just Harvard, it will affect you, and their districts too

Who hasn’t drawn a Texas carbon at some point in their life though? 😬

Who's calling the shots at NIH? Sworn testimonies and internal e-mails reveal for the first time the breadth of DOGE's control over the world's largest public biomedical funder. DOGE has provided lists of hundreds of grants to cut, and DOGE is now reviewing ALL NIH awards before they're released

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday 📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

It's not just Northwestern and Harvard, I have gotten credible (confidential) reports from several other schools (including state schools) that the NIH is defaulting on federal commitments there too. Seems like there may be a big story here for an investigative reporter willing to take it on

I was working on a proposal in response to one of these calls. Submission deadline next week. The proposal was 95% done, and I only learned about the cancellation from this post. 🤷‍♂️