Jason Rasgon

When I turned them down I suggested that their offer was missing about 4 zeros as I'd never be able to work again. Even if I agreed with the anti-Wolbachia argument.

They seemed surprised. I was pretty pissed when they emailed my student

I often criticize the World Mosquito Program. ~10 years ago I was approached by PR firm representing competing control organization. Offered me 10s of thousands of $ to put my name on ghost-written articles & do interviews trashing WMP. Turned them down & they approached my grad student w same offer

A PR company working for Colossal Biosciences is sending AI generated pieces to respected science journalists & asking them to publish the articles under their own names. This is so dodgy & just goes to show our critical expert scientific commentary is working. Sci comm failure 101 for Colossal.

Based on some papers I've read recently maybe it is acting at a PhD level...

(I uploaded a PDF for GPT-5 to summarize. Rather than read the document, it just read the title of the document and wrote a summary based on what it thought the article would be about.)

My rental car does not have cruise control because cruise control is a "Subscription add-on service" that hasn't been paid for.

This really is the worst timeline

End of summer lab lunch

The many benefits of the LPU A Daniel Sarewitz wrote an opinion piece in Nature awhile back to argue that the pressure to publish regularly has driven down the quality of science. Moreover, he claims to have identified ……

Why publishing early and often advances science faster than complete story bullshit.

This is related to replication and generalization.

From the Archive: The many benefits of the LPU drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/t...

Let's just say i'm caught in the middle of something right now and none of the people involved are happy...

I've purchased lambskin condoms to use as bloodfeeding membranes for mosquitoes. Try explaining that one...

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Funding Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Funding

For anyone who hasn’t seen it:

I'm sorry. Does this asshole think that I get to pocket NIH grant dollars in my personal account?

I once had a refund from a canceled purchase that had a seven dollar discrepancy (resulting from changing exchange rates). I had to pay that shit back to the grant out of my pocket

a man is sitting at a table with a stick in his hand ALT: a man is sitting at a table with a stick in his hand

Just me, formatting manuscript references by hand. As God intended

But I did get a haircut and a beard trim yesterday for completely unrelated reasons, so that was good

A compact vector for scarless gene editing in E. coli Here we present pCASKD, a single-plasmid system for scarless chromosomal editing in Escherichia coli. Our plasmid pCASKD integrates CRISPR-Cas9-mediated counterselection, Lambda-Red recombineering, an...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#microsky #synbio #ecoli

Got filmed for the teevee today. Totally forgot they were filming today. Asked them to film me from the waist up as I was wearing cargo shorts and flip flops

The definition of a good compromise is when no one involved is happy with the outcome

Qian Xuesen - Wikipedia

A source today reminded me of Qian Xuesen, the CalTech scientist who with von Karman selected Nazi rocket scientists in Operation Paperclip and co-founded JPL, and got hounded out by McCarthyism and racism. Then he founded China’s space and nuclear programs. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xu...

If so, why did he kneecap the CHIPS act?

a man wearing headphones is talking into a microphone with the words that bothers me below him ALT: a man wearing headphones is talking into a microphone with the words that bothers me below him

I'm now older than my (long retired) PI was when I started my PhD. I'm also now apparently considered one of the senior members of my field

metro.co.uk/2025/08/06/m...

Brandy old fashioned FTW

I was in grad school counting 10's of thousands of mosquito eggs at 11pm at night

Meta-analyses of Culex blood-meals indicates strong regional effect on feeding patterns Author summary Being aware of mosquito biting behaviour is essential to determine the threat of mosquito-borne diseases. Studying the feeding patterns of Culex mosquitoes is crucial as these mosquitoe...

149/250 is Meta-analyses of Culex blood-meals indicates strong regional effect on feeding patterns

Hugely important, and we need more of these underlying studies - I worry about some of the regions being under-studied

For no particular reason, I watched "Judgement at Nuremberg" from 1961.

It is a powerful and thought-provoking movie about German judges tried for their actions in Nazi Germany.