The recording of "Illuminate variant impact with images" by @drannecarpenter.bsky.social‬ and Runxi Shen is now available: youtu.be/l8y00jKXJx4 This talk is part of @broadinstitute's MPG Primer series. For more info, check out broad.io/MPGPrimer

In Somebody’s Daughter, I wrote about a middle school teacher who was super kind to me, and how he influenced me to expand on my preoccupation with reading by encouraging me to write as well. Earlier today, at the Indiana State Library, his adult daughter was in my nonfiction writing workshop 🥹

Again: if you are attending a meeting and start coughing or sneezing in response to an oncoming cold, excuse yourself. Or at least wear a damned mask. Respect your colleagues.

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered Trump to restore $500 million in frozen UCLA NIH grants. The same judge, Rita F. Lin, previously ordered all UCLA NSF grants reinstated. Lin has now nearly entirely reversed Trump's July de-funding of UCLA research: www.latimes.com/california/s...

The word “autism” was first used to describe behavioral differences in children in 1911 but autism has been documented using available records going back to the 1700s (definitively) and further. Acetaminophen (Tylenol, paracetamol) was discovered in 1878 and first sold in the United States in 1950.

Here's the link if u want 2 attend the AI & Data Sci panel on Fri 9/19 w/speakers incl Enoch Huang, @drannecarpenter.bsky.social Jeremy Jenkins, Enrique Garcia-Rivera. Listed after the keynote by Vertex SVP Mark Bunnage thebiotechclub.org/career-fair cc Boston Protein Design Club & @sokrypton.org

Pfizer's VP Machine Learning Enoch Huang, the Broad Institute's @drannecarpenter.bsky.social Novartis VP Jeremy Jenkins, Formation Bio's Head of Data Science Enrique Garcia-Rivera & Vertex alum Maria E. Morales are speakers on 9/19 AI & Data Sci panel at @harvardmed.bsky.social. Link is ⬇️ #biosky

I want to start a new global movement: Meetless Monday - we encourages people to reduce their meeting activity by one day each week for personal health and the planet's well-being.

After careful consideration of the current situation and the tools at our disposal at this present time, I have made the strategic decision to Lie Down For a Bit

principal investigator component analysis

More foundations should do this: "Funding is exclusively available to applicants who have already received federal funding (e.g., from the NIH, CDC, NSF) for their health equity research, but have since had their funding rescinded due to federal administrative actions" www.rwjf.org/en/grants/ac...

Happy upcoming Pioneer Award Application Day to all who celebrate. I was mentioning that the best review comment I've ever gotten came from the related DP2 (New Innovator) mechanism. Enjoy this throwback to #GrantReviewGreatstHits as the deadline gets closer! May you all do better than I've done!

JOB ALERT 🚨 We are hiring TWO principal investigators in cell, molecular, systems, or chemical biology in Toronto, Canada at @sinaihealth.bsky.social. We provide a generous startup, fully funded salary and academic appointment at U of Toronto. www.nature.com/naturecareer... Please repost!

As an anthropologist, I'm inclined to try to understand stuff that looks like magical thinking rather than mock it, but proposing to build a God and then expecting him to tell you how to get rich is really testing all of my professional training...

It is impossible to explain to civilians how it feels to finally, FINALLY, land a clearly within-payline NIH grant score and then have it go unfunded because of all this regime bullshit. You all have my sympathies. Unfair doesn’t even begin to describe it.

The order to restore grants applies to 300 NSF grants, not the NIH grant suspensions

You can tell the world has gone to shit because last time I was at the dentist the hygienist asked me if I was regularly flossing and I said that I only do it sometimes and she was like yeah that’s fine I don’t really care

It’s just matrix multiplication

$200 million from Columbia $500 million from Harvard $1 BILLION from UCLA?!

Oh so it does have phd level intelligence

A paper from the JUMP Cell Painting Consortium presents image-based phenotypic profiles for 75% of the protein coding genome of human U-2 OS cells, offering a valuable resource for exploring gene relationships. @shantanu-singh.cc @drannecarpenter.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Morph Map is now published in Nature Methods. Excited to see what the community discovers with this resource mapping ~15,000 human genes! rdcu.be/ezGre

Check out this opportunity to join my lab as a postdoc! www.ebi.ac.uk/research/pos... Every year, faculty from EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Sanger Institute co-develop projects that allow fellows to be part of ✨both✨ of these amazing research institutes.

If anyone is curious about the current list of search terms being used by right wing activist organizations to harass university professors, here's a public records request I received today from Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation. Not intimidating or meant to curtail by my speech at all, right?

Good news for NIH MIRA applicants. Grants.gov recently published the forecast notice for the reissuance of the EI/NI MIRA notice of funding opportunity. As indicated at the link, the estimated post date for the NOFO is Nov 3. www.grants.gov/search-resul...

Have $10M and want to cure some diseases? It costs ~$1B to invent a new medicine…but $10M buys you Project Encore, to see if ANY existing drug might be repurposed for ~100 diseases that have no treatments. Contact me - be a hero for desperate patients! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Meet the 2025 ASCB Award Winners—trailblazing scientists honored for research, mentoring, education, and innovation. Celebrate excellence across all career stages in cell biology. Read more: www.ascb.org/society-news...

Important details from this story: 1) Yet another news-break by student journalists (this time @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social) www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... 2) Harvard saying "see you in court," not "let's make a deal." 3) Per Garber, WH/MAGA leaked news of a "deal." NYT then ran with it.

My talk at Accelerating Bio-Innovation gives a flavor for how cell-based images are propelling new treatments: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP-G...

Our paper benchmarking foundation models for perturbation effect prediction is finally published 🎉🥳🎉 www.nature.com/articles/s41... We show that none of the available* models outperform simple linear baselines. Since the original preprint, we added more methods, metrics, and prettier figures! 🧵

Look what I grew up with in the 1970s:

The thing is that full unfettered impoundment authority is effective authority to threaten and coerce a bunch of action you don’t have legal authority to compel. Unilateral impoundment authority is destruction of the rule of law.

Go for it. I don't even care any more.

A flaw in the analysis presented by NIH, is taking the global APC average. I suspect there are cruddy journals that charge little, and I don’t think those should be factored in to an average relevant to NIH funded research, which other studies show to be higher quality than average… 🧵

On X, Masaki Nobushiro posts a recurring (and useful) drawing about how people wrongly think a 1m tsunami is a cresting wave when it's actually a wall of water filled with dangerous and deadly debris that's strong enough to sweep up a car. #tsunami

Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird. (he drew a bird into a spectrogram, played that sound to a starling, and the starling reproduced it back to him with enough accuracy he got his bird drawing back in their call's spectrogram) www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQC...

We are gonna have charts for AI slop exposure by generation like we do lead

So glad I slept through whatever the hell this was

This is unfortunate: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u... I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

“Small children from poor or middle-class families who watch ‘Sesame Street’ do better on cognitive tests and in first grade than children who do not watch it,” Renata Adler wrote, in 1972.

My family lived on a shoestring budget and I didn’t attend preschool. But I was (secretly) reading well before kindergarten, and I’m pretty sure it was at least partly due to Sesame Street.

Helsinki hasn't had a traffic fatality in a year: "Helsinki's current traffic safety strategy, covering 2022–2026, is nearing completion. It has focused on improving safety for children, youth, pedestrians and cyclists with safer crosswalks and smarter intersection design."

few outcomes, except for 99% of FDA-approved drugs, 174 recipients of 104 Nobel Prizes, training ~30K MDs and ~10K PhDs per year to enter the workforce, and a 34% reduction in age-adjusted cancer deaths since 1990 -- the largest decrease in history

EMBL Cell Biology and Biophysics department is searching for a new director. A major position to lead this field in Europe and beyond. embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

It’s probably because I study physiology and not psychology, but I really think humans are not nearly as in control of our behavior as we assume. Why is it “patients gave themselves diabetes by eating too much sugar” and not “what about their bodily functions made them crave so much sugar”

Every. Single. Story. about women not using AI as much as men portray it as bad for their future career prospects (without a shred of evidence) and a result of women being fearful little ladies rather than looking at AI's output and saying "this sucks, it's not going to help me."

Wait, sometimes there are surprises. Apparently some Republicans have now grasped the immense damage to their communities caused by massive cuts to NIH funding. We told them this beforehand, yet they still thoroughly enjoyed seeing the massive cuts…until it affected them directly.