As far as I can tell, RFK Jr.'s latest antivax stunt runs counter to the WMA Declaration of Helsinki. Withholding HepB vaccination clearly does not meet any definition of clinical equipoise. Doing it anyway, overseas, is straight up colonialist medicine. Details in Dr. Jacobs's thread below.

“The changes permit as few as one outside review rather than the current minimum of three, end the routine use of expert panels to discuss those individual reviews, and give program managers greater authority to recommend which proposals should or should not be funded.”

Cruel, unpopular, health and life endangering (as in *checks notes* my own life)

(Also, I'm generally curmudgeonly about the push for academics to be All The Things (entrepreneurs, scicomm experts, journalists, Thought Leaders, etc) without institutional support or protection. E.g., "scicomm" is a specialty in itself, not something just any researcher can do)

Getting a COVID Vaccine while Pregnant Slashes Risk of Premature Birth, Major New Study Finds www.scientificamerican.com/article/gett...

Truly, hormonal depression and anxiety are prevalent and devastating. I speak from experience. Taking away tools to manage them at critical vulnerable periods - without evidence - is shortsighted and cruel. ('shortsighted and cruel' could be a tagline for RFK's policy proposals writ large.)

the proximate reason i post here — beyond the fact that i like a lot of you and enjoy reading your thoughts and jokes and observations — is that this is a non-algorithmic platform where people share lots of stuff and people read what is shared. that's still valuable even if it doesn't "influence!"

Intersection of the month: I'm a huge @askamanager.org fan and our dept is currently working to hire a new Chair (and I have a small child). So, naturally, I'm re-reading and re-cracking up about story 10 The Dean: www.askamanager.org/2024/08/the-... Do yourself a favor and read it. Delightful.

I had some serious issues with decisions made while Claudine Gay was president, but I appreciate the very clear example of the normalization of pushing Black women out of their jobs and moving right along

Public education was never meant to be the sole source of education for our children. This is why there's a long history of supplementing public education with cultural programming to pass down languages, histories and political education (think: freedom schools).

We pay taxes and public education is a collective good. May as well benefit AND be part of making it better (e.g., fighting for better work conditions and pay for public teachers, because their work conditions are our children's learning conditions)

As a (to me very enjoyable) part of this paper, we worked out what mutation-selection balance looks like in finite populations with varying degrees of inbreeding.

Also folks arguing that they don’t need Gen Ed/any Ed outside of topics directly related to a chosen career are doing the work of fascists for them. There’s a reason they don’t want us educated and only want “skilled workers”

Cool, so where's the maternity leave? Where's support for working mothers? What about one's who can't nurse for whatever reason? Or is the goal just to keep us at home and out of sight?

Many of us need to keep writing federal grants (both for political reasons and as a Hail Mary to keep people employed) despite the feeling it's a waste of time, so... if you got an NSF or NIH grant funded this year, would you mind bragging about it in the replies, so it feels like the odds are >0%?

In which Julian tries to separate out the “bad” kinds of eugenics so we can keep the good stuff. This will work for a while if you are determined not to think it all the way through

Thrilled to finally share the magnum opus of my PhD that focuses on the genetic basis of evolutionary change! Specifically, we know we can map the genetic basis of a trait, but can we tell which genes will underlie the trait shift when it evolves? doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Remember when they fired the president of Harvard for… two inadequate citations in her 30yo dissertation?

"We’re pleased to introduce some cutting-edge yet profoundly user-unfriendly technology."

Anyway, if you want to follow people like me who are actively confronting racist pseudoscience and want to hound them into starting a nonprofit that can structure and support this vital work, check out this starter pack from my friend @jowiph.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/jowi...

bro are you fucking kidding me

The world

Men

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

I’m so glad to hear that Molly and Sandy heading up Amplify Legal, powerful storytelling org Abortion in America’s legal arm! Both are great leaders in the fight for reproductive rights, including supporting people in telling their stories (1/2) www.morningstar.com/news/pr-news...

If our university system emails me about joining weight watchers one more time I’m going to blow my lid. Multiple times this week (open enrollment). It’s a) none of their business b) not a good program c) doesn’t even work d) could be wildly triggering to someone with disordered eating. (1/2)

And for the trainees and scientific staff in their labs.......

Super cool new use of single gamete (single molecule!) genome sequencing - catching de novo mobile element insertions! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

From recombination superstars Payseur and Otto: new preprint "Elevated mutation near crossovers inhibits the evolution of recombination" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My take on the transformative gift that is MacKenzie Scott and her almost $1Billion in giving to HBCUs since 2020, and why what she is doing goes far beyond philanthropy--it is protecting the future of Academic Freedom, and Diversity. READ: www.forbes.com/sites/sophia... @forbes.com #HBCUs

Did you know that the genes for critical, ancient components of protein synthesis machinery - tRNAs - are bombarded with mutations, leading to remarkable allelic diversity that likely has functional consequences? I didn't until we did this project! Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/2)

Open letter from many #Emory faculty re the firing of a med school colleague. We asked that only tenured faculty who are citizens sign it. Many people worked hard on our Open Expression Policy, only to have it violated at least 3x in less than 3 yrs. www.emorywheel.com/article/2025...

@joann-trejo.bsky.social, @marymunson4.bsky.social and I have a commentary in @natcellbio.nature.com on recent attacks on DEI in biomedical research: "If scientific research, especially biomedical research, is meant to serve everyone, then it requires that everyone has an opportunity to participate"

12/12

Free, professional illustrations of research organisms! 🎨🐁🪼🧪 We compiled original vector/raster graphics of 70+ organisms & viruses into a CC0 library. All by @arcadiascience.com's Audrey Bell Check it out & show us how you use them! research.arcadiascience.com/pub/resource... #SciArt #OpenScience

I call it “joyful rigor” when I explain this effort to my students. I don’t believe in or rather, I’m not a “suffering poet.” I’m a writer who enjoys writing. The work works on me and I’m grateful for the opportunity to delve into the process at my own pace and to be changed by it.

THIS. I already missed a study section where I review grants two weeks ago due to the shutdown and the study section that was slated to review my grant that will decide if I get to keep my lab open or not ... was supposed to meet this week. Neither is happening and that is destructive to science.

Did you know that the genes for critical, ancient components of protein synthesis machinery - tRNAs - are bombarded with mutations, leading to remarkable allelic diversity that likely has functional consequences? I didn't until we did this project! Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/2)

The knowledge was already free!! Open textbooks and libraries exist!! The benefit of a professor is having an expert teach it to you in a structured manner with assignments for practice and assessments to keep you accountable. Profs aren't keepers of secret knowledge. We are essentially tutors.

I just emailed my "Silence" essay to the Presidents/Chancellors and Provosts of the 9 Compact universities as well as those from the 4 orgs with which I have been formally affiliated. The essay can be found here: jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g... and here: www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremy...

Everybody makes money out of academic authors except the authors...News. Wiley is the latest academic publisher to reach a multi-million deal to allow access to its content to AI developers, with no opt out, let alone payment, for the authors who created that content.

These three figures get me every time: Our conceptualization of heredity; the explanations which have the most explanatory force. I cannot overstate the importance of this book to #DevoEvo; it wrote us back into evolution; archetypes and all. (Re-reading for my foundations of DevoEvo class)....

Nature has published an article on the crisis facing MODs Model organism databases face budget cuts and closures www.nature.com/articles/d41... @zfinmod.bsky.social @xenbase.bsky.social @yeastgenome.bsky.social @mousegenome.bsky.social @ratgenome.bsky.social @geneontology.bsky.social @nature.com

There's an update on the state of FlyBase on the FlyBase.org front page. You can contribute to FlyBase at this link wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase... We express enormous gratitude to the people, labs, groups, and foundations who have already helped us. #FlyBase #Drosophila

For more detail on my experience: A thorough article and interview www.cnn.com/2024/11/11/h... Me two weeks post loss on Morning Joe youtu.be/JAmSk3Y9G38?... Article based on interview I gave 5 days after my loss/abortion www.usatoday.com/story/news/h... (1/2)

Hospital policies absolutely matter. And. The laws that cause hospital policies to matter this much are the problem! The policy at the hospital where I had to wait for lifesaving abortion care last year has been updated since (hurrah!) - but that does not help all or fix the underlying issue.

😳

Appreciate the framing of caution, but having seen vibe coded analysis routines the publication pressures that create them, this is candy flavored poison. The cited paper demonstrates the value of human labor in the training set, and required expert intervention in simply loading 8/12 datasets