I have been compelled to withdraw a manuscript from Science Advances due to complete lack of editorial support. We have been waiting almost two full months to learn whether they even consider the work worthy of peer review. Am I an outlier here, or have others had similar experiences?

🧬 We're hiring scientists! I'm building a new team at the Generative Biology Institute, Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford, next to colleagues in AI, Robotics, and Plant Biology.

History happening in fast forward

♥️ from my lab ♥️

We are also considering postdoc candidates with deep perspectives on transcription factor / chromatin biology, and would like to tackle such topics using high-throughput synthetic biology approaches.

Imagine thinking you might have an air defense system, then having these lumbering senior citizens plodding uncontested through your airspace.

first order effect: US air defense assets, especially high end SAMs, being used to defend middle east assets second order: less avail for Ukraine. more effective Russian ballistic missile strikes. cruise missiles, drones not so much. third order: China laughing as US stockpiles depleted.

Can confirm: this tool is very impressive. I'm fully bought into our AI-enhanced future. We will look back on the previous epoch as if we were living in black and white. Unfortunately the planet will be metaphorically black and white, with nothing but sun-blasted stone and shrunken seas. Oh well.

Rosalind's companion piece to our genetic interactions manuscript. GRAPE, to analyze synthetic lethality screens, and Synulator, to generate simulated synthetic lethal gold standards because none exist today. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Rosalind's companion piece to our genetic interactions manuscript. GRAPE, to analyze synthetic lethality screens, and Synulator, to generate simulated synthetic lethal gold standards because none exist today. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

"victory"

Playing Baldur's Gate 3 just so my computer will heat up my office.

Merry Christmas, genetic interaction nerds: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Delighted to host Traver Hart (MD Anderson Cancer Center), who delivered an engaging seminar on synthetic lethality at #HumanTechnopole. He showed how bridging #CRISPR and predictive modeling can advance design and interpretation of genetic interaction screens and inform new therapeutic strategies.

Adaptive behavior of predatory publisher "editors" - I was just invited to review one or more of a list of five articles, each submitted to different journals. I haven't seen that before.

NCI R01 NOA received. Long, long exhale.

Life goals updated. Source: www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolR...

I can withdraw from social media now. I have learned everything worth learning.

Ruin a movie by making it about Gary The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Gary

Ironically, it's not even in the Midwest.

I can

We acknowledge that no one has the bandwidth for this, but if it helps: - It’s ‘voilà,’ not ‘wallah!’ - It’s ‘a lot,’ not ‘alot.’ - It’s ‘further ado,’ not ‘farther adieu.’ - It’s ‘flesh out,’ not ‘flush out.’ - It’s ‘sneak peek,’ not ‘sneak peak.’ No worries if not!!!

IN CASE OF FIRE: 1) If someone is on fire, punch them in the face. 2) Cop a feel off the person behind you, as these might be your last minutes on Earth. 3) Squeeze the junk of the person in front of you. It'll slow them down, allowing you to move ahead of them. 4) Exit.

TIL the original paper describing CRISPR, by Francisco Mojica, was rejected by 4 journals and took 2 years to be published

Come be my boss! My dept. at GT is searching for a new chair. Drop me a line if you are interested, I'd be happy to talk about this position, GT, ATL- anything. It's a drama-free department filled with cool people in a dynamic city. www.biosciences.gatech.edu/chair-search

Today I learned a new word: zebra Zero Evidence But Really Arrogant

And all those people have kept the biggest secret in human history for all those years. 🙄

NIH is considering changes in supporting publication costs--some ideas are quite radical and would endanger our ability to publish at all. I don't love the cots from the big for-profits but it does cost$ to run a journal. Please repost. Comment at: osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form....

I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.

I love this. Interesting but imperfect parallels with quantitative biology.

We released a new version of ActivePathways for directional integration of multiomics datasets. V2.0.6 includes methods to compare directional & non-directional analyses to find candidate genes & pathways lost or gained when directionality is accounted for: github.com/reimandlab/A... led by @mslob95

Washington Post: “Is fascism bad? The answer may surprise you” Teen Vogue: “Here are three fun tips you can use this summer to disable an armored personnel carrier”

"feckless fucks as far as the eye can see," the name of my new album

Really not sure where this incoming class of life sciences grad students is going to find labs. Funding cuts means labs are inevitably getting smaller and the biotech job pipeline has shut down so people aren't as eager to leave. Slow motion train wreck.

Reminder! Tenure track position in Genetics at Trinity College Dublin! Come join us, we're nice... 😊 Please repost! 🙏

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...

This is so, so important to show. Thanks for your efforts.

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! 🧵

The Sydney Sweeney debate is resolved by the 🧵 below.

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

New prototype of Pickles now available for your review. Complete rewrite into node.js and JavaScript. Much faster for basic tasks. And entirely written by Claude/Sonnet, with ~8 hours of interactive prompts. pickles.hart-lab.org

Amidst all the chaos, I'm thrilled to have received a notice of award for my K99/R00! I've been waiting on pins and needles since this was scored in April (impact score of 14!!). I am officially on the job market - reach out if you are hiring or know of interesting positions anywhere!

What are your essential books on complex adaptive systems? I am making a list of my favorites and want to be sure I don't miss something. #complexity

For 9£/$12, this would sell like crazy here

Not sure who came up with "Manhattan Plot", but in 2014 I coined the alternative term "Nijmegen Plot" (inspired by the Dutch town where I live) to describe underwhelming results from our earliest genome-wide association scans of language/reading traits.

Biologist folk (especially in evolutionary biology and/or ecology, but it don’t matter): Can you give me your favorite examples of trade offs in biology? Organism or system don’t matter. Primary literature or reviews preferred.