This approach definitely got me through grad school. If I did half the stuff I agreed to do I'd still be working on my PhD

NIH grants have been under political scrutiny since early 2025. But what does the screening process actually look like? What is being flagged? I spent a month digging into leaked docs and emails. We've published the 235-word list that are being flagged by an internal AI tool. And so much more. 🧵

Wow crazy

Amazing work on this. Seems fair to assume it's all faked at this point...

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

Paying peer reviewers works. Expanded Fast & Fair experiment @biologyopen.bsky.social: • 5.5 vs 37.7 working days to decision with reviews • ~3 vs ~9 reviewer invitations per manuscript • no reduction in editor-assessed review quality • similar acceptance rates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It’s truly astonishing to see how comprehensively the US government is tearing down every part of the system that has made it up until now a world-leading power in science, research, and technological development. The entire world will suffer from this wanton destruction.

Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

🚨UPDATE: We will launch our action center on this issue tomorrow. 📣JOIN US: Emergency Science Meeting (Virtual) June 2nd at 4pm et. Details to come. Our Policy Team has read through the entire 400 page hot mess express from Russ Vought...here are the high level details. A Thread🧵 1/x

So... I got more information about this plan. The most important points follow on the next posts. 1/3

NIH funded peeps: This is insane and coming for us.

There’s only one correct answer to a request like this and it’s “get fucked.” I realize that most individual investigators are not in a position to respond this way, but isolationism as a condition of funding will destroy US science even faster than a dearth of funding will.

My MIRA renewal application is submitted. Finally I can enjoy 6 months of general unease before learning whether my lab will continue to exist

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures" but their own internal data.

Excited to share our new preprint (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...), integrating aptamer based sensing into our DNA nanoswitch platform for protein detection. The project almost died about 4 times, and it's nice to see 10 yrs of back burner simmering coming out fully baked. @arunrichard.bsky.social

In August, Jay Bhattacharya said “Training future biomedical scientists” was the 1st priority for his version of NIH. But talk is cheap. Let’s see how JB’s doing. 🤔 NIH supports trainees mostly via fellowship (F), training (T), and career development (K) awards. Here are funding curves for each.🧵

I'm very excited about this new preprint on our work (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...). We re-engineered gel electrophoresis for our DNA-base biosensors and came up with a 3D printed mini-gel, complete with electrodes. short thread...

New preprint from our lab, really exited about this one and may post more about it later this weekend

Our light guided molecular patterning method for high-throughput single-molecule studies just published today in Small! Programmable, covalent, multiplexed, accessible. doi.org/10.1002/smll...

What better way to start the year then with a deep dive into multiplexed force spectroscopy? It was a lot of fun putting this together with @halvorsenlab.bsky.social. Hope you check it out!

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

Starting the new year with a review article! (with @wesleywonglab.bsky.social) This feels like a pretty big accomplishment. I remember how much I relied on annual reviews as a grad student to dive into a subject, so its surreal to be on the other side... www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

suspect a big reason why many academics and others who work in areas where getting facts RIGHT is key are disinterested in using LLMs for research: they’ve tried it, they keep noticing major errors in output, and they conclude that having to verify all that doesn’t actually save them time.

I may be reading this wrong, but there seems to be conflict between the PAR-26-121 instructions and new biosketch instructions. In particular the "contributions to science" which MIRA calls for with citations and new biosketch which doesn't allow citations. Anybody resolved this yet?

imagining a NSF PO handing a VC bro the stack of 10-to-15 proposals they'll have to be ready to discuss, then explaining that they'll be paid $600 for the three days of the panel meeting

Excited to be featured in this @cenmag.bsky.social piece with @standupforscience.bsky.social friend @jeremymberg.bsky.social ❤️✊ cen.acs.org/policy/nih-n...

Christmas came early! New science toy from @lumicks.bsky.social for @thernainstitute.bsky.social - very excited to get this all set up and operational.

Our latest lab paper (and last for @jibinpunnoose.bsky.social) is out! We look at strand polarity in base stacking interactions, with single-molecule measurements and MD simulations with collaborators in Chen and Vangaveti labs @thernainstitute.bsky.social pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Hey @nature.com, have you got an explanation for how the hell THIS happened? & especially why you accepted a paper with such a bizarre piece of genAI slop in it?! & more to the point, why we should take you seriously at all going forward? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dang, hard disagree. The best papers to write and read are works of art, not merely a list of data and statements. Don’t let LLMs take this away too, for gods sake.

ICYMI: #UAlbany's Life Sciences Research Building will get a $50M state-funded expansion to support The RNA Institute. The funding will advance the Institute's research, training & workforce development, including its use of AI to guide drug discovery. www.albany.edu/news-center/...

Some really nice fundamental biophysics of DNA base stacking 🧬!

Well, it's been a minute but we have a new preprint to share! Final project in our lab by @jibinpunnoose.bsky.social, investigating strand polarity in base stacking. We measured experimentally with centrifuge force microscope and computationally with MD. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New editorial by Madhan Barathraj and me, discussing DNA nanostructures for nucleic acid delivery, is now online at Expert Opinion on Drug Delivery. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Yesterday we bid farewell to Jibin, who has been in the lab for 7 years and is starting as Assistant professor of chemistry at SUNY New Paltz. Congrats and best wishes - we were so fortunate to have you in the lab.

We need a new microscope objective. A $1.6k tariff for something that you can hold in your hand and that is only manufactured in Germany

NEW: In an unprecedented move, the NIH will soon disinvite dozens of scientists about to take positions on advisory councils that make final decisions on grant funding. NIH staff were told to select others aligned with the Trump administration and told to expect placements by political appointees.

This is so sad...plus I'm all in on science, there is no plan B

Join the 22,339 people who have joined to support our NIH colleagues. Let's get this to 50,000 RT

Announcing an official fundraising campaign to support my lab’s research on APOE4 and Alzheimer’s disease: joinus.cuimc.columbia.edu/participant/.... This campaign is itself an experiment of sorts. But mostly, it's an attempt to save my lab during an unprecedented time of turmoil in academia. 1/9

For non-scientists: the funding rate is somewhere between 7% to ~25% (rare) for NIH or NSF grants, depending on where you are applying. Grants are reviewed by a panel of peers who read the grants, score them, then debate the ratings for 1-2 days to rank them. It is INCREDIBLY competitive already.

🚨 NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya is testifying before the US Senate Appropriations Committee today. The hearing is bound to be spicy, after more than 300 agency staff wrote him a letter decrying his leadership and actions as director. 🔥 I'll be live-posting the hearing, so follow along here.

The NIH has not issued a single new call for proposals since the end of January.

Breaking news: Staff at the National Institutes of Health have issued a declaration calling on their director to depoliticize the agency and reverse spending cuts.

Let's have some fun. In this NYT story, we see a picture of an OpenAI billboard on a college campus, suggesting the following prompt: "Give me a guide for mastering this Calc 101 syllabus. In two weeks. Small steps please." What happens when we actually use ChatGPT to do this? THREAD!

uh-huh, LMK when its working so I can retire

"If the proposal is enacted, Americans today and tomorrow will be sicker, poorer, and die younger” an $18 Billion cut Only 3 NIH Institutes will remain in place, and even they will have their funds markedly reduced www.statnews.com/2025/05/30/n...

A Harvard scientist built a database of 2,100 NIH grant terminations. Then his own funding was cut, via @statnews.com

Good cover @economist.com