I contacted my NIH PO about the new rules requiring reporting foreign co-authorships on papers that acknowledge NIH support. Here's a summary of what I heard back: 1) NIH POs are confused about this too & fear a massive workload as a consequence 2) PIs should report co-authorships in their RPPR /t

Interesting. Full deletion of all introns in yeast was actually my project in the Staley lab, *20 years ago*. I actually found a bunch of phenotypes. We did this in collaboration with the Guthrie lab. www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

“The lab really feels like a family”

Thanks to @genetics-gsa.bsky.social for posting a comment on the proposed OMB regulations on federal funding. It was great to see our scientific societies finally step up and mobilize their members genestogenomes.org/gsas-public-...

Excited to share the published version with some added experiments and analyses: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

OUR WORK IS NOT DONE. In unusual move, NSF issued a request for information on plan to conform grant policies to the proposed (unfinalized) OMB rule. Plan includes changes to grant termination provisions & disallowing publication costs. Comments due August 24. www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

I now see they clothed these changes in more obscure language: to "incorporate mandated statutory, regulatory, Executive Order, and policy-related changes,” among other updates-- in other words to let the OMB proposals and the Trump EOs the norm. The deadline to submit comments is August 24.

Cannot be more excited about the lineup for the inaugural Function of Evolving Systems GRC conference I am co-organizing with the amazing Joy Bergelson. Less than a month away: August 9 - 14, 2026. Still a few spots left! And do check out the amazing list of speakers: www.grc.org/function-of-...

directly emailed my responses to the OMB proposal to @usrepjimmypanetta.bsky.social, @schiff.senate.gov and @padilla.senate.gov this morning

Four hours left. Do it. Two or three paragraphs of your own text are enough.

Support for the rule, by contrast, was almost entirely organized: nearly nine in ten supportive comments (about 2,500) came from a single form-letter campaign. Opponents mostly wrote their own comments; supporters mostly signed the same form-letter.“

“The opposition is overwhelmingly grassroots rather than orchestrated. Form letters make up only about 16 percent of all comments (roughly 8,400 comments across 210 distinct campaigns), and only about one in eight opposing comments came from a form-letter campaign...

So, how often in NIH-land does "pending administrative review" end up without a NOA?

Paper acceptance to start the week, and desk rejection to end it.

I'm excited to share that our work studying gene dosage response curves (GDRCs) is now out in Cell Genomics (@cellpress.bsky.social). www.cell.com/cell-genomic... [1/n]

Our latest work on drug resistance and epistasis. We performed comparative deep mutational scanning of two fungal orthologs to estimate how much data on one can help predict the impact of mutations on the other. We dissect the source of epistasis at the atomic level. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I have attended as a participant, organized one and evaluated proposals in this program. This is amazing at all levels!

Proofs! I will never not get excited looking at proofs.

Update of my NIGMS funding estimates/data. Thanks to @needhibhalla.bsky.social for pointing to some FY2025 numbers showing funding rates. Funded grant # are from Reporter. FY2026 is in progress. A few points 1/

If the stated goal is 75:25 R35:R01, then one way to get that ratio is for R35s to get crushed and R01 not bouncing back

NIGMS funding trends in FY24-25 discussed in NAGMS May 2026 Open Session for Council, starts at 24:17 videocast.nih.gov/watch/e213ef...

Excellent response from Dr. Bertagnolli to the article from Scott Atlas www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-a...

“There's a piece of NIH's mission Atlas never mentions, because it doesn't fit his story: NIH doesn't just fund experiments, it funds people. Training grants, fellowships, career development programs, and research project grants that carry graduate students and postdocs through their formative yrs”

The NIH is an ENORMOUS bargain for the American people. Do folk think that private industry will do the background slog work for drug discovery for 250K direct costs?

It is sad that Scott Atlas doesn’t understand basic economics. Paul Samuelson wrote about public goods—why NIH has been such a stunning success—more than 75 yrs ago. Also, to see why Atlas urges ending US success, just look at who elevates him: pro-privatization billionaires. 1/

Yes, these discoveries were subsequently used to develop drugs by private industry. That is how the biomedical research ecosystem almost always works. Discovery to Expansion/Refinement to Development 6/7

This checks out for an institute founded by the President who oversaw the greatest economic collapse in US history.

😮 @danielgorelick.bsky.social @biologyopen.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Scientists, especially younger ones, are going to have to come to terms with the idea that “doing science” is no longer enough. We all have to fight for science: what it means, what are its values, and why it matters.

Claude Science - an AI workbench for science. This looks like an interesting attempt at making scientific workflows easier and more reproducible. I'm curious to give it a try. www.anthropic.com/news/claude-...

Does every enhancer work with every promoter? With @jengreitz.bsky.social and Will Greenleaf, we revisit this long-debated question and resolve an outstanding contradiction in the field. A tour 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Glad to see this story and coverage of an important paper. www.statnews.com/2026/06/17/n... 1/16

I talked about these papers #smbe2026. If you are interested in doing research (PhD or Postdoc) on this topic, get in touch! (if were there, sorry for the abrupt end; somehow timing got off) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41763210/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39146405/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41699381/

Research flexibility under a NIH grant award, part 1. drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/06/29/r...

The Kaplan Lab at the University of Pittsburgh has received funds to recruit a postdoctoral fellow to establish a multiplexed assay of variant effect for a disease gene. This relates to our studies on RNA Polymerase II. This project requires experience with human cell lines and genomics 1/

Please email me if you are interested in this postdoctoral position on gene expression and human disease mechanisms and apply here with a cover letter and CV: 2/2 (reskeets/reposts appreciated!!) cfopitt.taleo.net/careersectio...

This is also how NIH talked itself out of fixing the Ginther Gap. “Oh look, some of this is due to CV and some is due to the topics proposed so never mind the 80% of the bias left unexplained*.” *institutional and systemic racial bias

Why would you say it can be used on CVs for tenure/hiring etc if not an indicator of “quality”

“The biases do not disappear; they get encoded into the model and then laundered into outputs that feel objective because they are numerical. “

“None of that is compatible with a business model built on extraction and rent-seeking. Companies that have spent a decade hedging against consequence have no real incentive to take consequences seriously.”

“As an informal experiment, I submitted the QED white paper to QED itself. The system assigned it a QED score of 46 and identified several methodological concerns.” x.com/sinabooeshag...

Yet another (potentially important) example of how AI is trained on data with lots of biases built in and then spits them back as "objective" "judgments". Removing bias is also hard and it is likely to be particularly hard for LLMs that use lots of sources where the biases can manifest themselves.

"The biases do not disappear; they get encoded into the model and then laundered into outputs that feel objective because they are numerical. Replacing one prestige filter with another that is harder to see or challenge is not progress toward equity in science; it’s the opposite."

“Ranking all life science preprints on a single scale simultaneously, across neuroscience, structural biology, bioinformatics, and plant biology, assumes a commensurability that does not exist.”

Thanks @blekhman.bsky.social. This captures much of what concerns me about the 1% ranking. I think it's trying to be a more 'fair' ranking of what should be making it into glam journals, whereas I feel like the glam push underlies a lot of toxicity in our field.

Very similar, some differences in UG vs Grad student make up, R16 has expectation higher % of students supported by Pell grants. Decent chart here. www.ninds.nih.gov/funding/abou...

NIH Director's New Innovator Award (DP2 Clinical Trial Optional) NOFO is posted. Applications due Aug 17th. files.simpler.grants.gov/opportunitie...

“Other AI tools give you answersthat might be true. Only QED gives you answers that are true. No summarizations or hallucinations. Just critical reviews, at scale.”

There is only one way to unambiguously evaluate papers. Read them. "How do I evaluate papers outside my expertise?" If a paper is so far afield that I can't understand it, then I defer to folk in that field. I get the impulse to devolve everything to a single number but this is nonsense