Fyodor Urnov

Wie lautet die Bezeichnung dieser Spezies nach der Linnéschen Systematik? Ich möchte bitte sofort sämtliche verfügbaren Informationen darüber erhalten. ❤️❤️❤️

Alan Wolffe told me in 1998 that the central goal of chromatin scholarship is to determine which of its states are instructive and which are merely permissive for gene expression.
The sum total of rigorous TAD literature since says they are the latter and very rarely the former.

Our award-winning, NYTimes Critics’ Pick film, HUMAN NATURE, is now free for K-12 classrooms! It explores the science, ethics, and human impact of #CRISPR.

Deemed “essential viewing” by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna.

▶️ bit.ly/humannatureedu

#ScienceEducation #STEMEd #K12Education

After 30 min on "nano banana" in Gemini-3 I would like to know: does BioRender have a future for plain vanilla scientific schematics?
I got LLM instructions for how to write the prompt for the image below and 1.1 sec later ...

PSA:
this prompt in Gemini-3 takes a zoom transcript with 12 participants and 90 min of technical discussion and in 0.5 sec converts it into 28 pages of flawlessly formatted, clearly legible, zero-reduction-of-dataset-dimensionality text.
There are MANY reasons to be concerned about AI - but wow ...

decorative illustration of DNA

Out now in the The Atlantic — IGI's Jennifer Doudna and Fyodor Urnov on this year's remarkable progress in using #CRISPR to treat rare diseases. Read here: https://ow.ly/5vJ750XFQon

Bay Area Startups Want to Make Genetically Engineered Babies. What Could Go Wrong? | KQED We’ll talk to experts about how innovations in genetic engineering are being directed what is at stake.

🎙️ON AIR:

Startups want to make genetically engineered babies. We talk to @innovativegenomics.bsky.social's @urnov.bsky.social, @wsj.com's @klong.bsky.social and Center for Genetics and Society's Katie Hasson about what's at stake.

❓Would you support genetically engineering embryos?

📻 Listen:

YouTube video by Scotland National Team 🎙️ ICONIC Radio Commentary | Scotland v Denmark | Scotland National Team

With the important exception of folks from Denmark - to whom this unfortunately does not apply, undskyld - this is 8 min of pure ristretto-grade joy.
(oh and if you like football / soccer, the goals are phenomenal)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8qF...

It’s like the influenza cap snatchase. 🤓

Every single person working today in every branch of cell and gene therapy - viral, nonviral, editing, transgenesis - owes a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. High.

I see, thank you. I suspect there will be an arms race in other fields between the watermark placers and the watermark removers....

I see. To be clear - I am a complete dilettante in AI - if you use established AI LLMs for image generation - the LLM will embed a non-deface-able watermark?

Wow. It should to better. There are 1,536 online textbooks for that it can tokenize and vector-weight-compute on that.

The delicate issue is that no one knows how humans know, and there is a growing movement in neuroscience to say the mind learns by tokenization and matrix embeddings.
What was the material, K?
I tried on genetics and it was flawless.

Mmm! In this case perhaps the Licor file?

Pedro, journals could ask for the primary Licor files as a countermeasure. WDYT?

Holy mother of my personal lord Gregor Mendel.
We now have WHAT?!?

Not lower-div. The LLM is superb where there's a huge corpus of outstanding literature about well-understood subjects - AND the user knows how to write intelligent prompts.
Try it - go to ChatGPT5 and tell it to explain eg linkage at an upper-div college level. Then ask followups. It's _stunning_.

Re ChatGPT in college ed.
I first GSIed in 1991 at Brown and joined Berkeley faculty in 2000 - 50 semesters of teaching upper-div.
The "conversations" I've had w the LLM about areas I teach in blow me away.
Fellow faculty - specifically for upper-div bio we may be obsolete soon.
Don't at me. Try it.

I need to understand how Marco managed to get a camera in front of my car.
(those very few of you who do not understand what this is about - enjoy every second of that unique state)

YouTube video by DocShadow660 Look Around You: Season 1 Pilot - Calcium

It's Saturday. With that. I am forced to watch a 35 min UC video about cybersecurity and it's a stunning phenocopy of what, IMHO, is the single best TV comedy work from the UK (other than the Python TV series and FT). Give it a shot. Its joys unfold slowly.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaV...

Please consider La Châtaigne in Lafayette. I came back from two weeks living in the Marais this summer and having the real thing daily. The croissant beurre d’Isigny at La C is as close to the original as one can imagine. Get there early - they sell out fast. They open at 8. 🇫🇷

A New, ‘Adorable’ Deep-Sea Fish Swims Into View

How incredibly gracious and sweet they named the vehicle "Doc Ricketts."
"Canary Row" is one of my favorite books of all time and this story warmed my heart.
Plus the fish is totes adorbs.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/s...

David Baltimore, Nobel-Winning Molecular Biologist, Dies at 87

Of David's countless accomplishments is the important work that Matt Porteus did in his lab on early-stage genome editing with engineered nucleases (pubmed 12730593).
He and Matt both speak about this in the documentary "Human Nature."
A true titan.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/s...

Potent and uniform fetal hemoglobin induction via base editing - Nature Genetics A comparison of fetal hemoglobin gene editing strategies using human sickle cell disease donor cells and in vivo transplantation finds that adenine base editing of the –175A>G site in the γ-globin ...

I will switch out of "dripping with scathing sarcasm" mode and cite a lovely paper by David, Shengdar, Mitch, et al - one of many such papers - where this technically trivial experiment is done.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multiple overlapping binding sites determine transcription factor occupancy - Nature A new method enables comprehensive screening and identification of low-affinity DNA binding sites for transcription factors, and reveals that nucleotides flanking high-affinity binding sites create ov...

If only, if ONLY there was some method to change these newly discovered TF binding "motifs" at endogenous gene regulatory regions to see if ANY of this new phenomenology has ANYTHING to do with actual gene regulation...
1. PHE PHE SER.
2. SER MET HIS.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Epigenetics: the way genes learn from experience" (Mikula BC, Genetics 140-379; 1985).
Here it is, folks - an atlas of human genes learning from experience.
Holy Waddington.
www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

In Brief: A new center in San Francisco will offer tailor-made CRISPR therapies to cure children with rare diseases www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fellow editors - nota bene 10x!

PSA:
if you're not a mouse person you may enjoy knowing that mouse Sca1 (the hematopoiesis marker) is not encoded by Sca1 (spinocerebellar ataxia 1) but rather Ly6a.
I mean, OF COURSE it is. What else could it be?
I'm an hg38 person and below is a self-portrait while I was figuring this out.