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-...

Having a computer job, masking, vaccinating and not going out much only works if you don’t also live with a small human who will lick everything and then sneeze directly into your mouth.

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.

Anne Moffatt's memoir, The IT Girl, details the story behind the photograph with the baby—where Moffatt, then Technical Lead at Shirley’s company, Freelance Programmers, programmed the black box flight recorder for the Concorde

But my point is that the EPA was going out of their way to keep live coverage of this announcement under the radar

Yesterday at a semi-truck warehouse in the middle of nowhere Indiana, Lee Zeldin annouced that the EPA is trying to recind the regulatory basis to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. I was there. Here's my story for @cenmag.bsky.social: cen.acs.org/policy/regul...

CBER director/CMO Vinay Prasad is out at FDA: www.statnews.com/2025/07/29/v... Sounds like the rare disease community played a major role in pushing for his ouster, after a dizzying series of moves on Sarepta's DMD therapy (which has been implicated in the deaths of several patients).

POLITICO compiled a list of all the Washington Post staffers who have left in the past eight months. It’s at least a hundred names, many of them among the biggest names in journalism. This is the fastest erosion of a major outlet ever.

An intentional, avoidable mass starvation event is happening in the context of an ongoing genocide and not only is the US not doing anything to stop it, we are actively enabling it, both materially by continuing to fund and arm Israel and also by silencing protest here. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Treating women in pregnancy is a necessity, not a luxury. We shold not neglect treating mental health concerns just as we should treat high blood pressure (paraphrasing the expert)

As a 37-weeks-pregnant person who just spent 45 minutes on the phone trying to assure continuity of care since UHC is kicking my OB out of network 10 days prior to my due date, ASK ME HOW I FEEL ABOUT THIS FDA PANEL ON PREGNANCY CARE. GO AHEAD. JUST ASK.

Today in "AI fails to answer basic factual questions correctly, even while citing sources that have a correct and nuanced answer:

Important (depressing) coverage from @leighkboerner.bsky.social cen.acs.org/environment/...

Laid off from a bioinformatics/AI lab lately? Perhaps you'd like to land $10K-25K by jailbreaking the latest release of ChatGPT into generating bioweapons. openai.com/bio-bug-boun...

Folks who've had questions about the new NIH animal research policy may be interested in the new NIH Director's Desk episode - with Nicole Kleinstrauer, on The Future of Animal Models. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSvk...

Some #FridayFun - Reporters at @cenmag.bsky.social get a lot of press releases that don't fit the magazine's coverage. When one about injecting salmon sperm DNA for skincare reached @laureloldach.bsky.social, she used it to dive into some weird science for #Newscripts cen.acs.org/biological-c...

From @maxhenrybarnhart.bsky.social: 36 chem department chairs have published an open letter calling out recent federal policy decisions impacting science. cen.acs.org/policy/resea... #ChemSky @cenmag.bsky.social

Hard to know what to say about all these policy flip-flops, except: as demoralizing as they are for those of us trying to keep scientists informed, they must be 10x worse for NIH staff trying to roll them out and 100x worse for PIs trying to figure out if they can make payroll.

Important coverage of the impacts of NIH staff cuts: www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

As I know my own part, I do not have an answer to that question for myself. But is it true of our society as a whole? Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame? - end -

Would I have said, ‘you can't do this? You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The Constitution will not permit that.’ I see nothing in this record. And when I ask myself that question without the protections of an independent judiciary, so necessary for our society,

And so I've asked myself. What if I didn't have those protections? What if my job was on the line? My profession. All a career to which I have devoted whatever poor skill I have. Would I have stood up against all this?

BREAKING: A federal judge in Massachusetts (the Reagan-appointed William Young) has declared the Trump administration's cuts to NIH grants — ostensibly over Trump's EOs on gender ideology and DEI — are "illegal" and "void." He's ordering many grants restored.

After ruling, with anger in his voice, Judge Young: "This represents racial discrimination. And discrimination against America's LGBTQ community. That's what this is. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out. And I do so."

👀

Just in time for Father's Day: I wrote about a postdoc whose baby rejected pumped & frozen milk. His solution? Pitch a project to his PI, do a high-throughput screen for food compounds that block milk fat globule breakdown, and launch a company to develop the result. cen.acs.org/biological-c...

"If this is how DHS responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they're doing to day laborers, to cooks, to farmers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California and throughout the country." - Sen Alex Padilla. (Starts around 35m) www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJKS...

California's Senator Alex Padilla is dragged out of a Kristi Noem press conference by security, then forced on the ground and cuffed. Stills from video:

And as with the pandemic it’s hard to know where to put that feeling. Why do people have to witness the devastation before they can accept it? Why are decades of accumulated knowledge of our species not enough? Inspite of everything I have learnt about trust etc that still does my head in..

Here's an off-the-wall source request, and perhaps a bit of a timeline cleanse for molecular biologists: I'm looking for someone who knows anything about how salmon sperm DNA became such a ubiquitous reagent. (ThermoFisher Scientific- the first vendor that came to mind- surprisingly unresponsive.)

HEGSETH: The mission in Los Angeles is about maintaining law and order REED: Excuse me. Law and order is a civil function under the Constitution of the United States

Nitrogen allotropes are rare. A new one just dropped. Read about the work from Peter R. Schreiner, Artur Mardyukov, and Weiyu Qian in my latest piece for @cenmag.bsky.social cen.acs.org/materials/in...

🚨 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.

Covering this morning's Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on the FY26 budget request from NIH.

Abruptly firing 17 public health experts is not having the stated-to-be-desired effect (trust) over here. www.hhs.gov/press-room/h...

One thing Dr Bertozzi told me when we talked, not in the story, but has stuck with me: "It's important for all of us as patriots to say what we believe is of benefit for the country."

Ok fine I'll listen to the Bhattacharya/Huberman interview amd share my notes

Today in responses to requests for comment on a study: "I'm free, just writing a grant to a funding agency that may or may not exist, lol." T.T

“Say it’s 1955 and we’re funding Jonas Salk. We might have just canceled his grant,” says a program director at a small institute at NIH who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That’s hard to sleep with.” Great coverage @laureloldach.bsky.social cen.acs.org/policy/resea... #[email protected]

In response to the Bethesda Declaration, Jay Bhattacharya says it “has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken in recent months, including the continuing support of the NIH for international collaboration. ... (1/2)

Lots of people are keeping silent, because lots of people are scared. But my colleague Aayushi Pratap found a group of chemists at Columbia willing to talk about what's going on in the labs they lead. Her story, and Natalie Keyssar's portraits, are worth your time. cen.acs.org/policy/resea...

Science-adjacent punk

I appreciate the accessibility win at #ASMS2025 of having tables & chairs in most aisles at the poster sessions. What a nice way to merge resting your feet with taking in science!

I need to actually get to my gate in time, but am stuck processing this particular table:

As you probably know, you've got around 2m of DNA squeezed into every ~25um nucleus in the 30 trillion cells in your body (give or take a few RBCs and myocytes). This new technique cld help researchers understand how all that compaction remains ordered + why it goes awry cen.acs.org/analytical-c...

Well, if anyone is wondering whether I have too many irons in the fire, I just sent a query to a member of the Baker lab [at UW] asking for help tracking down a member of the Baker lab [at UNC] whose ASMS talk sounded cool, but whose last name I couldn't find.