Fil Bednar

Some tremendous photography on this site showing the everyday beauty around us. We make the world around us, so I will try to contribute in my own little way…

This is not the Carribean, Fiji, or the Med. This is southwest Michigan!

Activity of most genes is controlled by multiple enhancers, but is there activation coordinated? We leveraged Nanopore to identify a specific set of elements that are simultaneously accessible on the same DNA molecules and are coordinated in their activation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨 Last week to apply for AAS Student Travel Awards!

Both awards provide travel funding to attend the AAS Annual Meeting, connect with leaders in the field, and advance your academic surgery career.

📅 Deadline: September 5, 2025
Don’t miss your chance! Apply today: www.aasurg.org/awards/stude...

Great work and keeps tying in to the altered “sugar” metabolism in tumors and suppressed tumor immune response! Love the summary!

Welcome!!!

Gutting the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention will cause irreparable harm. What RFK Jr. and the Trump Administration are doing to the CDC isn’t reform—it’s sabotage.

open.substack.com/pub/immunolo...

What to do with carcinoid crisis? 🦓
A frequent concern for patients with #NETs having surgery

We put together an international 🌎🌍🌏 multidisciplinary expert consensus statement
📢 Now open for feedback!

Sign-up here 🔗 surveymonkey.com/r/periopcarc...

📆 Open until March 3rd!

Having funded teams/contracts that required six figure+ funds a few times now, these numbers SOUND really huge in isolation to normal folks but they're not! Don't make floating numbers! I like to say things like this: "A cancer lab is basically a small business, with many jobs created by each grant"

Kluivert is on fire! Cherries FTW again! #afcbournemouth #premierleague

War Cherries FTW!!! #FAcup #AFCBournemouth

Hot take (or lukewarm…): with “AI” models predicting all sorts of genome/chromatin phenomena, it’s important to remember that these are still models! Experimental validation remains hard and is still key!

#GeneRegulation #GeneSky #Chromatin

Preprints often make news. Many people don’t know what they are The public needs context about unreviewed manuscripts, survey suggests

Yes it's important people understand a preprint hasn't been peer-reviewed. BUT it's also important to understand that what "peer-reviewed" means varies considerably, in some cases signifying nothing... www.science.org/content/arti...

1/Happy new year from the Metastasis Research Society!

As we close out 2024, here are some additional studies that have shaped our understanding of metastasis biology this year. 🧵...

Thanks for the post! Any restrictions on this offer? Will circulate among our Cancer Biology and other folks, if you’re ok with it?

Lightening up the lecture I write occasional commissioned pieces for Jobs.ac.uk, and today I’m mostly pointing you to my latest one over there. The lecture gets a bad rap. It’s pretty easy to find essays deploring the whole…

For anyone reading blogs over the holiday: Despite claims that the lecture is (or should be) dead, we'll still be doing it for the foreseeable future. So, we might as well do it well. Some tips based on my career of gradually sucking less: scientistseessquirre...

I had the Molecular Probes catalog as an outstanding fluorescence reference throughout my PhD and after… it was a terrific practical spurce of information before the wide use of the ‘net! Stryer’s textbook was my favorite during my undergraduate training!

Yes

a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on

Bluetorial: Mentors III The tall chemist from Nantucket

My PhD thesis advisor was a great synthetic chemist and a true scholar. He gave me freedom to pursue my dissertation research. Lots of chemistry today. And a surprising and somewhat distressing ending.

only just learned that using "from:me" in the search bar along with whatever phrases you're looking for is the way to look for posts on here that were made by you and I feel like I'm not the only one who didn't realize that and would probably be glad to know such a function exists

Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots An NPR investigation found Louisiana health officials told staff to stop promoting vaccines for COVID, flu and mpox, holding flu shot events or otherwise encouraging the public to get those vaccines.

Commencing the FA portion of FAFO. To be soon followed by … FO, of course!

www.npr.org/sections/sho...

All sorts of winning happening this morning in my office! Thanks to the unnamed journal sending a friendly SECOND notice for a review of a manuscript, which isn’t due until a week from today! Gee, I almost forgot after the first one…

(Narrator: he didn’t forget…)

After this, the resolution of the situation was that I have to send a FAX to a third party, just to be acknowledged and START any appeal process, where the CT may or may not be approved. This wasted time could’ve been spent actually taking care of patients instead! 2/2

Wanna talk about why patients and doctors are angry and tired of health insurance companies? I just spent 15 minutes of my day across two phone calls with two humans and one robot to appeal a denial of a CT scan for a cancer patient. The CT is a standard of care in their case. 1/2

two men are talking to each other with the words back off man i 'm a scientist on the bottom ALT: two men are talking to each other with the words back off man i 'm a scientist on the bottom

And this is where it started…

Professor School: Writing recommendation letters Because we were never trained for this job

One thing that all professors have in common in that we weren't trained for our jobs.

Now that I've been doing this for a few decades, I'm starting an occasional series called Professor School. It's not advice, just bunch of ideas and information to make things easier.

🧪

Here’s to mentors and sponsors!

💯 yes!

Cool cool…

Wow!

Cool analysis of large public scRNA-seq datasets and how stringent our approaches should be to scRNA-seq quality control.

The DropletQC paper from 2021 may not currently have as many citations as expected, but the idea is sound and good ideas stand the test of time. This work supports this notion!