We are proud to announce the formation of the Chemical & Engineering News Guild. We represent staffers across the editorial and operations teams at C&EN. 1/6

The vaccine news we have been anticipating is now here: www.hhs.gov/press-room/c...

"Biopharma people are shockingly the most reserved - they're a little too deferential to the FDA." - an anonymous peptide supplier quoted in this piece. That's, uh, that's one way of explaining it. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/b...

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Theorists: this shouldn’t happen! Biology: bet.

Fascinating conversation on the lifecycle of fields of inquiry:

This paper had me breaking out my biochemistry textbook to review GPCR signaling. Turns out, from time to time a receptor can release and recapture a GTP-bound G protein (instead of the classic cycle where GPCR binds a GDP-Gprot, swaps in GTP and then frees GTP-Gprot to go conduct signaling).

If you're a first-year biomedical Ph.D. student, I'd like to hear how your first few months of grad school have been going. I'm a science journalist at @statnews.com and got my Ph.D. in immunology before going into journalism. You can reach me at [email protected]. #journorequest

After helping someone near to me field a just-this-side-of-plausible pitch, I'm looking for perspectives on a zero-trust future of digital correspondence. Has anybody read (or written!) something thought-provoking on wrangling your inbox in a post Turing Test world?

You’ve just opened a Chemistry themed pub. What are you calling it? The Flask and Column #ChemSky #ChemChat

It just seems strange to not trust drug companies and actual research and to instead trust "med spas" with iv's, people making peptides in their garages, and formulating pharmacies with the cleanliness standards of Boar's Head plants.

OK, but as a Marylander, it pleases me to see Oakland on the real Bay

The end of the year is a great time to boost your colleagues. If you know an amazing early-career* chemist or biochemist doing creative work on important problems, please consider nominating them to the Chemical & Engineering News Talented 12 class of 2026? cen.acs.org/sections/tal...

Der Spiegel arranges for an academic scholar of media to produce — quarterly — an evaluation and critique of the magazine on any subject the scholar finds important. The latest, "Knowing Ignorance," is on Der Spiegel's climate coverage. Bernhard Poerksen is the author. www.spiegel.de/internationa...

Biochemistry fam, help a sleep-deprived reporter out. Let's say you wanted to explain the GPCR/G protein cycle to someone who hadn't heard of it. Would you call GTP and GDP ligands? Cofactors? Small-molecule buddies?

This filing is worth your time if you care about what’s happening to NIH. Also: I follow this stuff for a living, and I had forgotten all about the $500 million, not peer reviewed Taubenberger/Memoli vaccine development grant

For @cenmag.bsky.social, I tried to summarize what happened in science policy in 2025. Spoiler: A lot! Thanks to Ian Banks, @jeremymberg.bsky.social, Arthur Daemmrich, @cdelawalla.bsky.social and @ucs.org Jen Jones for their insights. Out soon: what to expect in 2026 cen.acs.org/policy/nih-n...

"It’s also, @georgwinter.bsky.social says, grounds for looking very closely at the proteome-wide effects of any compound in development, no matter its putative mechanism." PREACH #biotech #chemsky

Biology strikes again: a whole lot of kinase active site inhibitors are also targeted kinase degraders. (Sometimes not even the same kinase!) cen.acs.org/biological-c...

Why do babies need the hepatitis B vaccine if they aren’t high-risk? Short answer: Because hepatitis B is a tricky virus. Longer answer: Continue reading ⬇️ 🧵1/9 @kkjetelina.bsky.social @meganranney.bsky.social @jasonlschwartz.bsky.social @enirenberg.bsky.social

It just keeps going:

Friends, please do not buy Botox via WhatsApp to DIY wrinkle treatment at home. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...

A research team has found multiple lineages of archaea that have fully repurposed the TAG stop codon to encode the noncanonical amino acid pyrrolysine. cen.acs.org/biological-c... #chemsky 🧪

So, remember that MAHA summit 2 weeks ago that @statnews.com broke the news of and @maxkozlov.bsky.social somehow got into for Nature, even though it was closed to the press? The organizers posted the entire 6.5-hour conference proceedings to YouTube last week. cen.acs.org/policy/MAHA-...

To me, the issue is the internal editorial structure that keeps the political reporter from walking over to the science desk/slack channel and saying "hey, could you look over my coverage quickly and identify potential problems". So, I'd place this at the feet of the most senior editors.

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I am completely mystified by journalists' uncritical acceptance of the MAHA talking point (reiterated here) that American life expectancy is a KPI for the American research enterprise. For health systems, I can see it. But for NIH? www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Just this week alone.

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What if, instead of editing every premature stop codon that causes disease, researchers edited the translation machinery to skip those codons? cen.acs.org/biological-c...

Personal opinion that I am proud to have managed to get through as the lede of this story: differentiating between diastereomers is better left to chemists than Congress. cen.acs.org/biological-c...

People who are interested in this MAHA summit: it's on CSPAN right now, JD Vance and RFK in conversation. www.c-span.org/event/public...

I cannot stress this enough right now: share journalism that you think is good. You might not always be able to afford subscriptions or to tip journos but since everyone seems able to hate on headlines they dislike etc., they must also have the power to elevate good quality writing! We need it.

An optimistic-about-science thread is a rare pleasure these days

One problem with said training data:

I missed this news amid all the chatter about Watson on Friday. I wonder what they’re planning to do about the well documented problems with the training data? apnews.com/article/chan...

I lift the silly weights in the gym. I will mess around with my own words and sentences and thoughts out of it. See where it all takes me.

This obituary-slash-“what happened to Watson?”, by the late great Sharon Begley, makes me grateful that prewritten obits are a thing. www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...

This account is always interesting- on this piece especially

Torn between asking “how the F did they obtain century-old embryonic DNA to train on?” and “how heavily does the model weight ZIP code at birth?”

Wow, this is an interesting and rather sobering story: the commonly used drug rapamycin turns out in this particular application to be working via a completely different mechanism from its usual one, which no one had predicted.

My 14-yr-old and I were playing with Sora, gave it two prompts of things I/we had done that day 1/n

This means that we can screen for potential novel drugs for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in easily-grown skin cells, using mitochondria as a simple readout. In fact, a team at NIH’s NCATS is working on this now! Stay tuned.

My colleagues @rowanwalrath.bsky.social and @maxhenrybarnhart.bsky.social watched yesterday’s ACIP meeting so you won’t have to. They caught this particularly confidence-eroding scientific critique… 💀

I hadn’t heard of Maxine Scates before reading this poem, but she nails the moment: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

It so was hard to imagine having successful career in science as a disabled PhD student that eventually I just left. Who could have guessed that years later I would help create a magazine issue dedicated to highlighting Trailblazing disabled chemists! cen.acs.org/people/profi... #DisabledInSTEM

This is an interesting take from George Church, given that many sequencers seem to be competing on turnaround time, with neonatal diagnosis as a key use case. www.wired.com/story/whole-...

Shocking story. I hope that making it public improves life in some small way for the poor surrogate, who nearly lost her life and has lost at least one job to this vengeful family.