As a teacher, every year I struggle with administration pushing the latest tech. I want books in hands. I want pencils in hands. If we are going to use tech bring back actual keyboarding classes.

I've recruited some help in attempting to use genAI to generate grant checklists. A couple of thoughts are swirling in my head: 1) genAI remains incredibly poor at generating things where accuracy is important; 2) NIH grant instructions are terrible for inexperienced users

O'Neill, an investor in anti-aging technology who worked on HHS policy, would be the first non-scientist or engineer to lead NSF. His background will be a 'major concern' to the science and technology community, former NSF director Neal Lane told me. @maxkozlov.bsky.social and I report:

I'm really not a communist, even though @mikesortarocks.bsky.social likes to pretend I am, but sometimes I read articles like this and go "yeah, I get why people find Marx appealing."

This past month and a half has been a sh*t show, personally and professionally. But yesterday, one client got a 4th %ile and one got a 5th %ile and folks, you have no idea what that news has done for my spirit.

Ok, then who is directing POs to tell applicants to change certain words in public facing documents (abstracts, narratives)? POs who had never once made such a request before 2025?

Great, now he can not do 2 jobs.

It’s also the first day of Ramadan!

Advertise your account with a gif...

My experience: clinical people use it way more than lab-based researchers

"It is beyond comprehension that the Senate confirmed this man to oversee America’s health. The risks are so immediate and constant that it can be difficult to keep track of them all." open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

The stupidity of finance guys is going to be the end of us.

The American Medical Association is launching an effort to evaluate vaccine safety and effectiveness independently of U.S. government health agencies

At this point, I'll pay people to stop writing Alzheimer's grants.

(Let's pretend we're in the normal times for a second) I have had a few discussions with scientists over the last few weeks that have gotten me to solidify a problem I am going to call "failure to generate enthusiasm." Grant reviewing is an emotional exercise and sometimes scientists forget that.

The other reason this makes me mad is that two years ago, I had an NCI PO tell me they were done funding grants that proposed to repurpose existing drugs for cancer treatment. They said they (NCI) felt like they wasted too much money on that already.

This is idiotic but will also cost lives. Oncologists are already dealing with patients (some with very treatable tumors) demanding to be treated with ivermectin. If you have HR+ breast cancer and you opt for ivermectin over hormone therapy, you will likely die.

I just want to point out that the people who staff Reason thought that being asked to state your pronouns at the beginning of meetings was a bigger threat to our society than fascism. So here we are.

More on NSF Here are the number grants that were active in each year (at least part) including the effects of grant terminations (data from grant-witness.us) by directorate from 2021-2025. The only directorates showing losses are STEM Education and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.

Your Black History Moment Not in The Epstein Files.

Donald Trump is a racist.

New paper alert! The latest from my lab describing atypicalities in the processing of cues in the PFC and V1 of preterm mice trained on a visual discrimination task: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Been on multiple search committees For me (personally so YMMV)…I basically dismiss everything that’s labeled *submitted* unless there’s a preprint I can read

More on NSF funding data A deeper dive into the numbers of awards by Directorate. 1/9

Jeremy Berg, continuing to be our national treasure

NIGMS will have council meeting tomorrow. You can watch the open session here. nigms.nih.gov/node/145911

Yeah, I’ve plenty of grad students that will disagree about not having their awards terminated. And a bunch of PIs of GRISE, URISE and IMSD grants. Those just being the ones I manage:

The original language benchmarked to FY24. Russell Vought reportedly threatened a White House veto over that language. Just so we are all clear where to place blame.

I have not seen this unicorn. Everything I saw from FY2025 was that funding went entirely by scores, meaning that I saw no select pays from the small bunch I worked on. Usually I see at least a couple a year, so this stood out to me. If there are NDs being funded, we want to hear about them!

This is the key to understanding this moment. Prior experience is not useful.

Folks, NIH is a mess.

This is the sort of thing that abundant (or reasonably available) federal funding protects you from: having to prostrate yourself in front of immoral rich a&&holes

I looked these names up yesterday and one thing that stuck out to me is that all of these people are invested in "living with the disease" philosophy. And it terrifies me but I think this is where we're going in the next 3 years.

IME, all the lore about "lone scientist goes against the grain and makes a big discovery" are fiction. You dig under the surface, talk to people that were there, and realize that it's always a group of people (even if just one got credit), always something that others were working on too...

Notice of Temporary Extension of Eligibility for the NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00): for Individuals whose final due date was September-November 2025 and January-March 2026. As always, reach out to your PO/IC contact to discuss. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

He’s right

If you have a preteen know that the HPV vaccine is approved for kids down to age 9. It's not on the schedule until 11 but given that this vaccine is on the chopping block, ask your pediatrician if your kids can receive it early.

AI will not cure cancer, story #587: I have a client who is studying a potential therapeutic target. All the literature suggests that co-targeting their original target and another molecule should be synergistic because they participate in parallel pathways.

🙄 CEO of a company whose wealth depends on convincing you that LLMs are super smart says that LLMs are super smart.

Another worthwhile investment is getting organized with your scientific communities (institutions, societies, etc.) to advocate for science. We’ve been taught as scientists to remain apolitical, but we no longer have that luxury.

I have been thinking about Dave's comment a lot over the last 12 hours. This round has been brutal, good scores are few and far in between (and still not sure if they're even fundable) so as I am meeting with clients, I have been pondering myself what other strategies are there.

Huberman decided that grifting the MAGA-sphere was more profitable than scientific integrity.

If this is the strategy for funding moving forward, I need to find a new job tomorrow. I certainly don't have any back channels to work, especially in this administration.

This round of grant reviews has been the most brutal of my career.

At the end of Yugoslavia, the Serbian leadership purged the military leadership of anyone who was not loyal to the regime. So when the regime ordered them to turn the tanks onto the citizens whose taxes paid for those weapons, there was no one left to object.

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him. White. Hot. Rage.

Now applications are getting kicked to SEPs due to a "surge in applications". Everything is fine.

I don’t see how we survive another three years of this madness

It should surprise no one that Trump is confusing Iceland for Greenland. He knows nothing about either one.

@ibcradiation.bsky.social @debeblab.bsky.social