Ed Hollox

A great acheivement and a huge resource. It's worth reflecting that the consortium was almost entirely driven by pharmaceutical companies, which in itself is fine of course. However, interesting to note that no UK universities were involved, only the University of Rekjavik.

Not really clear to me how such a policy could be made effective. Universities can’t ban students from exercising their legal right to claim asylum once here. They cannot look into their hearts or read their minds to screen out potential applicants for asylum motivation. So what would happen? 1/2

Kennedy Cancels Nearly $500 Million in mRNA Vaccine Contracts

I truly cannot emphasize enough how this is straight up Lysenkoism.

Because of the incredible work of our nation’s scientists, we have our finger tips on the closest thing humanity has ever come to “a cure for cancer”, but brainworm over here doesn’t believe in it.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/h...

It's wrong of course, but almost all conference attendees will be from countries where a visa is not required.

A herbarium is a magical place if you’ve never been. it’s a library of our botanical past. Like most libraries it doesn’t incur much cost for the wealth of knowledge it preserves.

Tired of Venn diagrams? Upset plots are the next-level visualization for intersecting gene sets. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating them in R. 🧵👇

It is really noticable that they are going for ad hominem attacks.

This company claimed to ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves. Then the fighting started. Colossal’s bold announcements have drawn criticism from many scientists, but the billion-dollar firm is not backing down.

There's so much wrong with Colossal Biosciences' comments in this @nature.com article www.nature.com/articles/d41.... It's our job as scientists & academics to provide expert opinion & scientific commentary as part of our critic & conscience role in society to help inform public opinion 1/7 🧵

More #ColossalBiosciences BS; Lamm says “We have a couple of consistent critics that don’t have the highest levels of credentials,” and that we’re “people who haven’t contributed to their fields in quite some time.” Yet they’ve applied for a patent based on our elephant TP53 retrogene/LIF6 work 1/n

Since genAI is trained on this tsunami of tshite, it will make genAI more and more erroneous and lead us back to actually reading the damn paper from established journals!

Of course they have.

Its the view of the maverick, the ends justify the means. Cooper is a prime example. CB are this in startup form.

Indeed. But given how CB have (allegedly) targeted critics, they must be under huge pressue to toe the line.

Shapiro is (was?) an excellent scientist, as are several other CB scientists. I find it difficult to believe that they actually believe this stuff. However, Shapiro's PhD supervisor had an (allegedly) intermittent relationship with integrity, shall we say...

The spatiotemporal distribution of human pathogens in ancient Eurasia - Nature Screening shotgun-sequencing data from ancient humans covering 37,000 years of Eurasian history uncovers the widespread presence of ancient bacterial, viral and parasite DNA and zoonotic pathogens…

#MetagenomicsMonday Analysis of aDNA from 1313 ancient human remains spanning 37k years revealed that the rise of infectious diseases coincided with animal domestication around 65k years ago, with disease spread intensifying during pastoralist migrations.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My colleague Flav Giorgini was lead guitar for punk rockers Squirtgun.

Text from an FAQ in Okbay et al 20222: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01016-z a similar same statement is made in an FAQ in 2025: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.14.653986v1.supplementary-material Text reads: "The results of SSGAC studies have sometimes been used by online platforms, including some companies, to predict individual outcomes. We recognize that returning individual genomic “results” can be a fun way to engage people in research and other projects and to feed or stoke their interest in genomics. But it is important that participants/users understand that these individual results are not meaningful predictions and should be regarded essentially as entertainment. Failure to make this point clear risks sowing confusion and undermining trust in genetics research"

It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ

I'm sure Thermo will sell a long stick for £75...

now google each of those six universities and “redundancies”

You know you are old when you are asked to give a talk entitled "My life in Science" 🤣

Interesting article this, and something I have particularly noticed. The first shock was when I became the age of my PhD supervisor when I was doing a PhD, the second shock is becoming the age of the parents of your PhD students...

Agree, but this is the case with science too. In addition, some of our sources are now generated with LLMs, critical assessment is essential.

They key thing is teaching the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs so that there are used appropriately in other coursework assessments.

Agree, can only be a component of assessment, but no degree relies on just one type of assessment of course. A valuable one across almost any degree, integrated into the standard programme. Should not be a bolt-on.

Talk to universities! A colleague has already introduced this type of assessment into her undergrad module in Clinical Sciences. More will follow I expect.

Well, I'm not holding out much hope given that a previous incarnation gave the prize to Kissinger. As Tom Lehrer (RIP) said, that was when political satire died.

Yes but thier great financial models predicted catastrophe unless our future income was slashed. Those of us who called this out and subsequently lost 63 days of pay were clearly naive... 🙄

Unfortunately, chasing people out of science and shrinking the science base is the point.

Chef’s kiss: the locally unlicensed doctor who injected them with peptides, after which they fell deathly ill, says it wasn’t the peptides because he asked AI and the AI said it wasn’t the peptides

RFK Jr. has said he wants to lift restrictions on this, while restricting lifesaving vaccines

There will be a few million Scots and Welsh who want a word!!!