Science really takes a village. Thrilled to share this with my friend @dudinlab.bsky.social, and with our brilliant and fearless teams, our collaborators around the world and our mentors - in my case a special shoutout to Buzz Baum, Jan Ellenberg and @monicabettencourt.bsky.social. 1/2

📢 NEW GENOME ALERT A chromosome-scale genome assembly of the necrotrophic predatory #yeast, Saccharomycopsis schoenii, provides a crucial resource for dissecting the molecular basis of fungal predation and mating-type evolution. Paper in #G3journal 🔗 buff.ly/y8jJVmH

Circling back around to this post in light of what happened at the ADA Annual Meeting yesterday. The actions of Kahn, et al., had all the elements of Good Trouble. - The action, itself, was harmless but agitating - They used their position to legitimize the action - They recorded everything

We are moving into a new scary era as scientists www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/w...

Diabetes researchers removed from a conference for handing out printed copies of their editorial warning that the Trump administration's funding cuts & delays will make America's health worse. The editorial: diabetesjournals.org/care/article...

The whole thread is worthwhile, but this point is key. AI is, to the degree it engages with the potential sum of human knowledge, restricting what we might know, not expanding it. And to the degree that it is killing the skills required to read what it can't, it's killing knowledge.

If you want there be to rules in government beyond Trump’s whimsy, now is a good time to say something. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/this-new-o...

Medical researcher I know responded to this with: "not to be dramatic, but it’s the end of scientific freedom in the US" www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

"This would be the end of American science as we know it," said @colesci.bsky.social, a policy analyst from the group @standupforscience.net who has been organizing to protest the change. "We're gonna make sure that it doesn't fade quietly into the night." www.npr.org/2026/06/03/n...

If Big Brother doesn’t like your science topic you won’t be funded and if Big Brother doesn’t like your results you will be defunded. A recipe for backwardness that seems to be designed by people who want America to humiliate itself and collapse. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

3500 comments have been recorded so far and there are hundreds of thousands of scientists in the US--its time for everyone to step up NOW OR NEVER 🧪

Look, I know I sound crazy, but WHY WOULD RUSSELL VOUGHT, mastermind behind Project 2025, WRITE THAT OMB CAN CANCEL ANY GRANT FOR ANY REASON IF THEY WEREN'T GOING TO DO EXACTLY THAT?! Mark my words: Agencies will send out blanket grant cancellation emails that will make 2025 look like child's play.

I was recently in a conversation with some big wigs and they were talking about their conversation with the NCI director and how he admitted that someone outside of NIH is making final funding decisions (but who that someone is, is anyone's guess)... and the big wigs didn't press him on it 😱

Between 2009 to 2018, CDC had a single non-Senate confirmed appointee, but now has 12. The increase in the power of appointees (tactic #2) is partly due to the removal of career officials (#5) plus a healthy dose of intimidation (#4). donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-creep-...

The creep of politicization is spreading across all sorts of positions in agencies that were previously seen as being non-partisan. Look at the drop in career officials and rise of political appointees in scientific agency leadership positions. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-creep-...

What should you do? WRITE A SPECIFIC, SUBSTANTIVE COMMENT about the OMB proposed changes. And ask your department, school, scientific society, colleagues, and union to do so as well. 🧪 Comment submission link: www.regulations.gov/commenton/OM...

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Calling all Scientists! Research Administrators! Deans! Fans of Science! No one is coming to save us. Here is your assignment. I have written a step by step, easy to understand "how-to" document to help you comment on the proposed OMB rule. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-we-ne...

“We warned of this exact form of government overreach in science a year ago,” says Colette Delawalla, founder of the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science. “It replaces expertise with political appointees, globally decouples the U.S. and completely guts our scientific ecosystem.”

If this pisses you off…get in. Register for our Emergency Science Meeting, yell at your Congress critters, and leave a public comment all in one place: fight2win.standupforscience.net

tl,dr; Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.

What's really astonishing is not the far right authoritarian party doing this, but the near-total lack of <loud public collective action> by university chancellors & presidents to oppose this existential crisis. Almost impossible to overstate how total a failure of leadership this is.

If these changes go through, it will be impossible to do effective science in the United States. Logistically, labs will not be able to function under these constraints. Team science—vital to almost every discipline—will be impossible under the rules around international collaboration.

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.

CA needs to go back to partisan primaries. this top two bullshit is ridiculous. partisanship is the main way people interact with politics. setting up a system where your D voters accidentally elect an R is incredibly shitty and undemocratic.

😳

Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating scientific output, but risks narrowing inquiry, weakening judgement and undermining how scientists are trained go.nature.com/3RiE5HN

While BioNtech & Moderna become household names because of their Covid vaccines, those emerged from different projects: finding ways to treat the most challenging cancers. They hypothesized that we could vaccinate patients against their own tumors, & evidence is mounting that they were right! 1/n 🧪

Why can't we explain enhancer action despite 2 decades of chromosome conformation technologies? 😬 Our new study spearheaded by Leonid Mirny's group points to a flaw in our assumptions, and to a solution from physical principles By @timothyfoldes.bsky.social 💻& @karissalhansen.bsky.social 🧪 🧵👇

Very excited that our discovery of Sms1 as the #MAPK #scaffold of fission yeast mating has just been published in @natcomms.nature.com! @biology-unige.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A lethal ORC ATPase mutation is suppressed by alterations in ORC and RNA Pol II transcription components https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.01.722367v1

This means that hundreds, if not thousands of labs all over the country will close. Tens of thousands of jobs will be lost. This is in defiance of Congress's will and in defiance of good stewardship of the US economy. This is entirely because Russ Vought hates science

There needs to be a giant billboard in every major American city that touts this. In any other era except this suicidal science administration, this would be a miraculous, wondrous thing.

I don’t know how to feel about grant rejections anymore. When you get a score that would have been funded at any other point in history, except right now, how bad can you feel? I see scores from friends and colleagues (and my own) and it just breaks my heart more than anything.

Big website update at SCIMaP today, including: 📉 maps & reports about projected impacts of White House's proposed FY27 budget 🧪 expansion to include estimates of loss due to NSF cuts 💰 maps detailing economic benefits of historical funding 🔎 search by zip code 🔗scienceimpacts.org #NSF #NIH #scisky

New York Times article about the slow pace on NIH grant making as well as enforcement of political constraints. [Gift Link] www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/s... 1/4

some data on the shrinkage

'Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content.' 1/3

American science is shrinking. 
A Post analysis found that, halfway through this fiscal year, the number of competitive grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health is down by more than half compared with the same period last year. https://wapo.st/3OgoHKV

A wake up call 👇👇👇

News I'm hearing from across universities is disastrous. The sector has been falling apart for months, but the process is now continuously speeding up. Outside a small handful of institutions, HE as we've known it has basically zero future. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Wise words from a brilliant, humble and absolute class act from the origins of life community.

New preprint with Bonny Brewer and Raghu's lab. Ku mutant genomes just go bonkers during chemostat evolution, but in very interesting ways! Telomeric amplicons of SUL1 and Y' in yeast are generated by microhomology-mediated break induced replication occurring in cis www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

“EARTHSET” (source: images.nasa.gov/details/art0...)

For me, the question isn’t whether generating art with AI is good or bad. It’s just definitionally impossible. Art is what humans create to express the nonliteral. An algorithm, however much data it has, has no sense of the nonliteral. It might make something that pleases you, but it can’t make art.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of—… (From High Flight by John Magee)

NEW: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been transforming a government that long championed vaccines into one that questions their safety. This is what could happen over the next 25 years if shots are unavailable even to the people who want them.

What would you say if a student were stress-vomiting outside the door of a required graduate discussion course?