WSJ editorial board hits FDA: It’s hard to recall a regulator who has done as much damage to medical innovation in as little time as Vinay Prasad who rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine without even a cursory review. www.wsj.com/opinion/vina...

Happy #DarwinDay! 🎉We celebrate Darwin’s insight into evolution by natural selection—a reminder that science education helps us question, explore, & understand the world around us. Honor Darwin’s curiosity & learn fast genetics facts at Discover Genetics: bit.ly/4rqaDwN

"We should be skeptical of any people who sell themselves as singularly capable of giving health advice on the internet and should always follow the money and connections where they lead." gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/o...

Attendance plummets at some science meetings. Travel bans. Gov Shutdowns. Funding. www.science.org/content/arti...

RFK Jr said during his Senate confirmation hearings that his trip to Samoa in 2019 ahead of a devastating measles outbreak had “nothing to do with vaccines." Documents obtained by @us.theguardian.com and @apnews.com undermine that testimony. Details here, by me and @aliswenson.bsky.social ⬇️

Excited to share my first preprint on federated conditional analysis of rare single variant and aggregate association tests across six genetically-inferred ancestry groups in All of Us and UK Biobank doi.org/10.64898/202...

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Surprised (but also not that surprised) that the AlphaGenome paper didn't officially cite any of the primary data used for training their model (see Fig. 1, thousands of datasets made with tremendous time and effort over >15yrs). What's up with that @nature.com ? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I wrote today about AlphaGenome, Google DeepMind's AI for DNA. It's powerful, experts told me, but it won't solve the mysteries of the genome overnight. Gift link: nyti.ms/4k5NFIl

more details and sharp analysis from @willoremus.com and @aaronschaffer.com here is a gift link wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

some of my favorite snippets from newly released court docs in the Anthropic copyright book case. eye-opening stuff on Project Panama, their plan to "destructively scan all the books in the world" in order to train AI

Not only was DOGE illegally accessing your Social Security information, but it was also illegally offering to share it with third-party political groups working to overturn elections. This is a deep betrayal of the public trust and must be fully investigated. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/u...

Come for this horribly depressing graph about the state of America’s health and science agencies and stay for the heatmap from grant termination hell. Essential reading from @maxkozlov.bsky.social and colleagues www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

"The middle powers must act together because if we‘re not at the table, we‘re on the menu". www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTvF...

“Foreign exporters absorbed only 4% of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%. “Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs functioned as a consumption tax on Americans.” www.wsj.com/economy/trad...

🚨 #ISMB2026 Proceedings submissions are due tomorrow, January 20 by 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (no exceptions). 📥 Submit here: https://www.iscb.org/ismb2026/call-for-submissions/proceedings

An interesting bit of history: In 1916, Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the US. You may know of them as the US Virgin Islands. As part of this sale, the US recognized Danish authority over Greenland. The text of the complete, ratified agreement is here: www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...

Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis

More than 200,000 Danish citizens have signed a petition to buy California as a response to Trump’s attempt to take Greenland. They say they will provide Californians with “rule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics, and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries.”

Deadline for proceeding papers for #ISMB26 approaching fast - send your work on sequence analysis algos and tag then for #HiTSeq @hitseq.bsky.social

⌛Remember: #ISMB2026 Proceedings paper submissions are due Tuesday, January 20! (no extensions)

📖 Big news! We just released the first five chapters of our new book, Hello Data Science. It is a fully open-access resource written for beginners. Please help us spread the word! A few points about the book are below 👇 🔗 www.hellodata.science #rstats #datascience #tidyverse

Watch: At #JPM26, former drug regulator Richard Pazdur rings the alarm about politics at FDA Full session: www.statnews.com/2026/01/13/j...

Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell: www.youtube.com/watch?v=KckG... www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/s...

Here's my latest contribution to the @nytimes "Lost Science" series. Brenna Henn's sweeping study of African genetics has been frozen. Gift link: nyti.ms/3Ypmm1A

Brenna Henn Wanted to Improve Genetic Medicine. Then Her N.I.H. Grant Was Cut.

It took a lot of imagination to maximize the human suffering while not saving any money when the dust settled. Hope this is wisely read. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

👀 archive.org/details/60mi...

"In a pan-cancer AI fairness analysis... we identify significant performance disparities in 29.3% of diagnostic tasks across demographic groups defined by self-reported race, gender, and age. FAIR-Path effectively mitigates 88.5% of these disparities" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This headline is wrong and misleading, and the brief text below it is not much better. Whatever might constitute a full explanation of the differences between sapiens and other hominins, we remain confident that 'genes' will be central to it. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A new study finds removing race from breast cancer prediction models worsens calibration. The change underestimates risk for Black women and overestimates it for Asian women, potentially limiting access to supplemental screening. #MedSky #MLSky #Cancer

Brutal but effective public health messaging from New York Public Health. The CDC is compromised. They’re no longer a reliable source of information. They push anti-vaxx & anti-science grift. Get your vaccines. Wear a respirator. Clean the air Get public health advice from experts, not RFK Jr

🧵Trump can be beaten. A coalition of over 150k workers at University of California-students, professors, office staff-but not UC leaders- represented by 21 beat Trump in district court to restore federal grants. "They had the courage to do what UC has not: Stand up to authoritarianism & win. "

Prasad has no training or clinical experience in Pediatrics. He has no relevant expertise in Immunology. If there were 10 deaths among the millions of children who received COVID vaccines, one should consider them rare, severe, complex phenotypes ...

Our paper on rare genetic variants and cardiometabolic, ancestry-adjusted polygenic risk scores (PRS) in a familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) cohort from Mexico is now published! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

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