"the researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers"

2025 was a banner year for the lab: much science was done. And for me: I got tenure! But it was a hard year for science, for being a scientist, for a future that depends on science. In 2026, I want to share a clearer picture of the enterprise of science and the amazing things it is accomplishing.

The devastation I feel about this attack on science in particular is hard to cope with. It’s like watching my dad die all over again. I would do anything to spare someone a death via pancreatic cancer.

FDA intends to put its most serious warning on Covid vaccines. The agency's “black box” warning is the latest move by RFK & the Trump regime to undermine a vaccine that saved millions of lives. The plan shocked outside experts, who say there's no basis for the warning www.cnn.com/2025/12/12/h...

The past is so recent www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/u...

In a special edition of her “How to teach this paper” column, Ashley Juavinett @analog-ashley.bsky.social explains how to best educate students about how the business of scientific research actually works. www.thetransmitter.org/how-to-teach... #neuroskyence

Just an absolutely gutting essay by Tatiana Schlossberg, a writer, mother of two young children, and cousin of RFK Jr who is dying of leukemia. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.

Giant copy of the Constitution being carried down Pennsylvania Avenue.

after millions of views and shares of my Portland Frog art. (thank you all🙏🏾) I got requests to highlight priests, and chickens, and Chicagoans, and T-Rexes, and more… all of us who refuse to bend the knee. so this is for US. 𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚕. 𝚆𝚎 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚆𝚒𝚗.

Some problems have simple solutions. This new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is one. The answer is simply saying no. Simple does not mean easy. But Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, Vanderbilt, Univ of AZ, UPenn, USC, UT Austin & UVA must understand what they’ll lose if they sign on.

AAUP v. Rubio is out, and look at how it starts. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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...

mRNA vaccines are safe, have been in development for decades, & have far broader applications than older vaccine technologies. New vaccine technologies evolve when scientists have tools & knowledge to make something more elegant or complex that wasn’t possible before. 5/

On the new acting CDC director. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Spread the word - we at @stanford-chemh.bsky.social are searching to fill a new junior faculty at the interface of molecular and computational science. See link below!

We're Hiring! Assistant Professor of Immunology and Molecular Medicine in MCB. Learn more and apply online: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05096

We're Hiring! Assistant Professor of Molecular Therapeutics in MCB. Learn more and apply online: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05098

Come join our new Department of Neuroscience @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05041

Would you want to invest in a country where the regime expropriates assets from its opponents? In related news, "personalist regimes are characterized by lower total factor productivity and ... low private investment, poor public-goods provision, and conflict" www.nber.org/system/files...

Science is effectively dead in the US for at least the next 3½ years, and will then take another several years to even get started again. Canceled research doesn’t just uncancel itself, and scientists who find opportunity elsewhere won’t just come flocking back. The damage is generational.

We are on a bullet train to the end of US science, and possibly the country as a whole, when political appointees are reviewing every scientific grant submitted to NIH to determine if The Regime finds the science acceptable.

In all, how much constraint on synonymous positions? From our model, the equivalent of 9% are predictable (sum of smaller effects on more positions) but that excludes strong overall preferences for fast codons. And 3% is just what we can see in a short competition. So: more than zero, less than all!

This preprint from Helen Sakharova is one of the coolest things to come out of my lab: “Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice.” Codon choice is a big puzzle in how information is encoded in genomes, and we have a new angle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

i think it is hard for some people to really their heads around the reality that kennedy is staunchly anti-vaccine and thinks that people should suffer through disease and that those who die deserved it and that those who survive are a better order of human being

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

Maurene Comey's goodbye note to SDNY colleagues:

Rümeysa Öztürk describes the library in the prison where she was held for 45 days for co-authoring an op-ed

Elon Musk casually, and illegally, dismantled USAID. According to a new study in the Lancet, that action will lead to *14 million* premature deaths between 2025 and 2030. Again: Elon Musk is directly responsible for 14 million coming deaths. 4.5 million will be children.

Email from Brown admin: government stopped payment on existing NIH grants as of April 3; in three months since, the gov't has cumulatively withheld $45 million in NIH grant reimbursements. Whatever injunctions, court orders, etc. may exist, no resumption of payments... and no explanation either.

Nazi Germany did literally ban Nature: "Articles are often published in the London weekly scientific journal Nature containing outrageous and vile attacks on German science and the national socialist state. The journal must therefore be excluded from general use in the scientific libraries."

“ICE gets a bigger budget than the Marine Corps” is a simple fact that should be communicated very widely because it clearly expresses how crazy and radical this is

“Rescission by inertia.” Rescission by any name carries the stench of Russell Vought, who seems determined to leave no corner of public service intact.

Elites aren't even using their existing mechanisms set up to allow deniable messaging. Go look at PhRMA, the big bad lobbying group; they've got nothing to say about their NIH R&D pipeline being destroyed, nor about the worst regression in public health and vaccine acceptance in U.S. history.

Just learned that Frank Stahl (of the Meselson and Stahl DNA replication experiment ("the most beautiful experiment in biology") died at the beginning of April, to no fanfare. Here's a lovely video of them reminiscing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-tn...

War on universities, war on science, war on knowledge

The White House's proposed FY26 budget would cut NIH funding by >40%. Our new #SCIMaP report projects the budget would lead to economic losses throughout the US with $10M+ lost in almost every House district. scienceimpacts.org/fy26 @joshuasweitz.bsky.social @asinclair.bsky.social @cl10.bsky.social

Donald Trump just unilaterally bombed Iran. A masked gang is terrorizing our streets. America has rapidly devolved into an authoritarian state. That's why, today, The Onion has purchased a full page ad in today's New York Times with a simple plea to Congress: Sit back and do absolutely nothing.

I’ll say it again: It was a huge mistake for Congress to abolish itself.

I was deported by the U.S. for reporting on the Columbia University student protests. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

Powerful story from Carolyn Johnson at the Washington Post... wapo.st/44ntbo4 [Should be a gift link; let me know if there are problems]

The repression of trans people is not, by and large, a grassroots outpouring of hatred from the American people. It's something that's been carefully planted and tended over years by a handful of media people and their pet reporters.

“The strategy: order agencies to freeze the spending now — then ask Congress’ approval, using a maneuver that allows the cuts to become permanent if lawmakers fail to act.” This is a form of impoundment that sidelines Congress & the compliant GOPers that run it. www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

Trump is cutting National Cancer Institute funding by $2.7B in the name of “saving taxpayer dollars.” John Harwood points out that Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires are 18 times that amount. But unlike billionaire tax cuts, federally funded research is a “return on investment for the entire country.

The Tea Party protests in April 2009 had about a third of a million people involved, and the political media treated it like a game changer for the Obama presidency. The No Kings rallies were AT LEAST ten times bigger than the Tea Party protests. Will the press keep pretending Trump is popular?

Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated last night, was the Speaker of the Minnesota House in the 2023-2024 session, when Democrats ran the state government. That means she had a leading role in shepherding the many landmark reforms that Dems adopted in that period—an important legacy. Brief 🧵.

San Francisco ❤️

I know there's a lot going on, but the Secretary of Homeland Security declaring that federal troops are in California and Los Angeles to "liberate" the state and city from its duly-elected leaders really is a fourteen-alarm fire.