James Watson has died. #giftarticle www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/s...

Excited to share our latest work on the factors that determine what genes we find (and don't find!) in GWAS and burden tests. We describe a critical concept that we call *specificity*. Led by Jeff Spence and Hakhamanesh Mostafavi:

The elimination of USAID was an unforgivable moral atrocity that should haunt Trump, Elon Musk and Marco Rubio for the rest of their days and beyond

I think I understand how it can be that LLMs are both exceptionally good and quite terrible at programming. It's because there are two entirely different skillsets that we both call "good at programming." LLMs have only one of them. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/llms-excel...

New study of 800K+ genomes from gnomAD reveals most “pathogenic” variants in healthy people aren’t truly disease-tolerant. They are explained by annotation errors, mosaicism, or compensatory variants. 🧬 A big step for precision medicine! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

UnitedHealthcare Pays Optum Providers More Than Non-Optum Providers www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1...

I’ve spent many years explaining/defending biorxiv’s “no reviews” policy. The logic was always that opening Word and opining is a far lower barrier than doing actual research, so noise’d be >> signal and we didn’t want to make subjective quality judgements. LLMs mean it makes even more sense 1/2

We’ve put up summary statistics for over 3,000 traits in the All of Us resource, and a shiny new browser alongside it! Explore your favorite gene or phenotype here: allbyall.researchallofus.org #ASHG24

Bay Area Pop Gen conference Dec 6! One of my favorite conferences. Registration is free! Only controversy is how to pronounce BAPG (bap-guh is the right answer). docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Delighted to see our method, PRSformer, at #NeurIPS2025! PRSformer is AI model for population-scale disease-risk prediction from individual genomes. It lays the groundwork for phenome-wide risk prediction. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Improving the Reliability, Quality and Maintainability of Bioinformatics Pipelines with nf-test. #NextFlow #Unitest #CodeTesting #Bioinformatics #Pipelines @gigascience.bsky.social 🧪🧬 🖥️ academic.oup.com/gigascience/...

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

2. Here's the paper itself: arxiv.org/abs/2510.19894

The White House is asking people not to share pictures of the East Wing because it’s even worse today.

Many US universities are reducing or pausing PhD admissions for 2026 due to uncertainty over federal science funding. This threatens to throttle the pipeline of future experts and may ultimately shrink the scientific workforce. #AcademicSky

People with some cancers live longer after COVID vaccination 😮 mRNA vaccines can augment immune checkpoint inhibition efficacy for patients with skin or lung cancers - by globally boosting immune responses 💉🧪⚕️ www.nature.com/articles/d41... Grippen et al study: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

People being treated for certain deadly cancers lived longer if they had received an mRNA-based vaccine against COVID-19 than if they hadn’t go.nature.com/4hkqZma

Autism diagnoses are on the rise – but autism itself may not be bbc.com/future/artic...

Images of the @nanoporetech.com party at #ASHG25 - going until 1AM!

#ASHG25 Short talks, instant gratification! Come and listen to the lightning talks today starting at 1:30 PM in Room 206AB (Level 2), “Scaling Precision Medicine” session.

What is better? A $300 long-read 20X genome? Or a $345 long-read 30X genome?

Elon Musk is doing Enron the right way. by Ezra Klein electrek.co/2025/10/13/e...

New pre-print: "PCSK9 and breast cancer survival: a Mendelian Randomization study" www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... led by Janne Pott. Brief thread:

Henry’s thesis is on: “Developing a Naturalistic Metaphysics for Biological Agency”. His goal (our goal in working together) was to show that there’s nothing unscientific or supernatural about ideas of agency, mental causation, and free will. ⬇️ (1/n)

🧪 The U.S. FDA's recent statement on acetaminophen and autism risk in pregnancy misrepresents the scientific consensus. Global health organizations affirm no conclusive link exists, underscoring the public health danger of selectively presenting data.

To be clear, there's overwhelming evidence that autism is primarily a genetic condition, and NO evidence for any of the bullshit this fool is spouting...

Autism Scientists Strongly Oppose HHS Report Suggesting Links Between Tylenol and Autism. www.coalitionofautismscientists.org

“Because of its safety profile & absence of teratogenic effects, acetaminophen is considered the medication of choice for fever & pain relief during pregnancy…we cannot ascribe any causal relationship between acetaminophen & autism, which remains the preferred drug for fever and pain in pregnancy.”

Exclusive: Publisher investigating DNA contamination paper that authors say CDC vaccine committee will consider retractionwatch.com/2025/09/18/c... via @retractionwatch.com

When a manuscript has serious concerns raised about its scientific validity and integrity, it should be carefully examined, particularly when it’s being used to justify anti-vax quackery.

I hope this is widely read. It reflects the extraordinary diligence of CDC during the extreme stress of the pandemic. None of this information is secret--it was discussed and presented publicly. www.statnews.com/2025/09/19/c...

Winner of mRNA Nobel Prize says ACIP member’s claim that Covid vaccines persist is “absolutely impossible” In Q&A, Drew Weissman says vast literature shows Covid shots are safe, refutes claims from Retsef Levi www.statnews.com/2025/09/20/d...

New blog post – A quick look at Roche's SBX lh3.github.io/2025/09/11/a...

DeepSeek R1 - the first widely used LLM to be peer reviewed and published in a research journal. And… with transparent peer reviewed! @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hankyoreh now has an official English translation of this editorial: english.hani.co.kr/arti/english...

Powerful new article in NYT Magazine on cancer research [Gift Link] www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/m...

A deep dive into the destruction of US cancer research by @jonathanmahler.bsky.social “It’s an absolutely unmitigated disaster,” a former top official at NIH told him. “It will take decades to recover from this, if we ever do.” Gift link: nyti.ms/48iH3Cr

Though it’s traumatic for me to bring this up, I was targeted by a group allied with Turning Point USA in 2018, with the help of Tucker Carlson on Fox. My home address circulated online and I got death threats. 1/

Our latest paper outlining our ecosystem of tools for mining the neuroimaging literature, is finally officially published in eLife! doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

SINGER, our ARG inference method, is finally published and freely available online: doi.org/10.1038/s415... It was a long journey – 16 months from initial submission to acceptance. Is it just me, or has peer review gotten more arduous lately? 4+ rounds of review isn't so unusual these days...

Some people call it a minefield. Others call it dangerous, even irresponsible. I call it the most promising field in life sciences. My love letter to social science genetics: communities.springernature.com/posts/a-love...

Hoarding of health data is common across Africa go.nature.com/4npaCGY

So much respect for this man - for his impact on the world and on my small life.

Clearly stated by the Lancet www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

We're still not finding any good evidence for a microbiome in any cancer type: see our new paper in @ScienceTM led by PhD student Yuchen (Peter) Ge www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... and the accompanying news piece, www.science.org/content/arti...

Powerful. This strategy of rubber stamping non-evidence based dogma laid out here is frightening. I hope oversight happens--Sen Cassidy knows better. www.wsj.com/opinion/robe...

In these dark times, it comes as a rare pleasure to highlight @natanaels.bsky.social ‬ & @marcdemanuel.bsky.social's work on germline and somatic mutations in humans. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...

Michelle Obama: kids should have healthier school lunches RFK Jr: maybe if we let the plague run wild we can build a master race Media: wow these are the same thing