London researchers estimate COVID-19 vaccines cost $79B in 2020–21 but returned $4.8–$37.8T in health and economic benefits. That is $60–$475 gained for every $1 invested, making them one of the best global investments ever. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Recently tested some de-novo minibinders against two targets (thanks Adaptyv!) designed using our open-source design library, `mosaic`; our best method got hit rates of 7/10 and 8/10 and affinities as low as single-digit nanomolar. Wrote up some thoughts here: blog.escalante.bio/minibinder-d...

Meteorologists now face a Trump ‘loyalty test’ when applying to National Weather Service jobs. The essay questions — which have nothing to do with meteorology — are part of federal guidelines launched as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to recruit “patriotic Americans” to its workforce.

This was the best case scenario. Unfortunately, we ended up with the Other Thing

Bob Clark, VP of marketing for Herr Foods, Inc., said the company was surprised to see it was mentioned in the press. “While we can’t speak to the details of the story,” he said, “we can confirm that our Sour Cream & Onion flavor is money.” www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/21/w...

I drafted for a fantasy league that's been going since high school last night. One of the younger guys (2-3 years below me) had to take a call in the middle. When he came back he said "Sorry, my paralegal is out today" I have never felt so old in my entire life

Trying to determine when industry will see the damage from lack of new research. I think probably starting in ~4-5 years?

this work saved millions of lives in 2021, won the Nobel Prize in 2023, and is cancelled in 2025

Looking for an apartment in SF has made me understand why people are so insane about housing there. You have to pay a gajillion dollars for a single room in a house and meanwhile there are no buildings above two stories

Hard to overstate how damaging this will be to science and universities broadly

Grant terminations have grabbed the headlines and have seen legal action, but even more damaging to the US research enterprise has been the massive decrease in number of research grants issued by federal agencies NIH has seen a decrease of 57% in the number of awards & 63% in value compared to FY24

New Consensus Statement in Nature Microbiology! Working with low-biomass microbiome samples? From deep subsurface rocks to human lungs, contamination is a major challenge. We offer field-to-data analysis guidelines to help keep your results clean. 📖 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

🥁NEW publication from our lab: the largest meta-analysis of gut microbiome associations with CRC! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵⬇️ 1/6

Slow grant making continues. Here is a graph through May 1st. 2/n

"This cross-sectional study of the oral microbiome in US adults showed that a few genera were universally present and a different set of genera explained a high percentage of oral microbiome diversity across the population."

The “brain drain” will be a primarily domestic phenomenon, w/ STEM-trained people moving into non-STEM occupations. There are not remotely enough STEM jobs abroad for our *millions* scientists, and even if there were, moving is hard, expensive & dependent on multiple intersecting privileges.

There are a lot of questions being asked about the awarding of a $500M grant to an #NIH team to develop a new (old) vaccine platform that could be used for a "universal" #flu vaccine. www.statnews.com/2025/05/03/n...

NSF has two kinds of grants, standard (where all of the awarded $ is issued up front) and continuing (where the awarded $ is issued in yearly increments). It sounds like they're freezing any expenditures on awarded continuing grants and not making any new awards for now. Disastrous for US science. 🧪

NEW: We (mostly @noamross.net) launched a website to shine a brighter light on terminated NIH and NSF grants. grant-watch.us It links to our NIH & NSF trackers, grant info submission forms, and other info. We'll also add new analyses soon. Check it out and let us know what else you'd like to see.

Our subclustering and transmission pipeline, PopPIPE has now been published: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...

I assumed someone had done this already- could be pretty cool for microbial ecology/defined community work www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Journalists need to stop letting non-experts say unchallenged how "great" LLMs are for researchers and scientists and actually talk to a few. The public has the conception that this tool is in use by mathematicians and scientists using it to craft theories, when it is totally useless for this

NIH announces Human Instrumentality Project www.nih.gov/news-events/...

ICYMI: New online! The global resistance problem and the clinical antibacterial pipeline

Now over a month since this beauty made it into print! journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....

I am thrilled to share the first manuscript from the Wiles lab! We present "Phollow", an in vivo phage-tagging approach that enables direct observation of phage outbreaks with single-virion resolution by live imaging. Here some highlights 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever they aren’t going into universities’ endowments they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research

This is just unbelievable

In a review led by @gilbertjacka.bsky.social in @natmedicine.bsky.social we highlight the state of clinical translation in microbiome research. We have gone from basic discoveries to FDA-approved therapies in <20 years, on par with the pace of mRNA vaccine development. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

WHAT www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/b...

This is a big deal. Spread the word. But it’s tiny compared to the totality of what’s happening at NIH. Cure Research for all cancers, Alzheimer’s, everything is being gutted. Intentionally. It’s all getting burned to the ground but the news isn’t getting out. The new cures won’t be there for you.

When I was in grad school in the 90's the rule of thumb from twin studies was that the heritability of everything was ~50%. It turns out that twin studies are highly confounded, & after unconfounding w/ new genome-based methods (Family-GWAS), the median heritability of behavioral phenotypes is ~5% 🧪

Today I've gotten instagram ads looking to poach American talent from both Australia and Denmark

NOAA’s office of Oceanic Atmospheric Research has had IT and other support contracts canceled in the last day or so that will fundamentally affect its operation. One source there said “It will seriously hurt our ability to improve weather forecasting and climate projections.”

This is really, really bad. These are the most common individual fellowships for grad students and postdocs.

Just before bedtime last night I got a message from inside NIH which read: “It’s so, so bad and no one cares (who has any influence)” I asked “What, in particular?” My friend responded “Everything”

The concept of media literacy is now Woke

it's so cool how Grand Vizier Chat (secret) is not only real but in fact the preferred policymaking apparatus of the global hegemon

From 2010 to 2016 (latest data I have ), NIH research contributed to EVERY drug approved by the FDA

Reading some biotech news

Scientists have invented a new way to cook eggs www.nature.com/articles/s44...

The physical biogeography of Fusobacterium nucleatum in health and disease https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40062772/

its amazing how chatgpt knows everything about subjects I know nothing about, but is wrong like 40% of the time in things im an expert on. not going to think about this any further

I gave Claude the easy task of comparing two lists of genome accession numbers. The python script it wrote functions correctly, but the matches it lists below DO NOT EXIST. You need to be very careful with LLMs. Errors like this could derail an entire project!