Yes

Isn’t that the only reasonable answer?

Has Eric Weinstein not figured this out? 😉

Yes, it's even less responsible than requiring relatively toothless progress updates. It also may make it more likely that the money is spent less efficiently given how scared PIs to wake up every morning and see what fresh hell is occurring.

Agree in principle, but are the progress reports for RPGs actually so important? Isn’t it extremely rare for the full grant to not be awarded?

@whiteheadinstitute.bsky.social @mit.edu

Functional genomic dissection of MS risk loci reveals convergence of cis and trans gene regulatory mechanisms in microglia Neurological diseases (NDs) are a major source of unmet medical need, and translational insights have been hampered by complex underlying pathophysiologies and limitations of experimental models. Nonc...

Tomorrow @ 8am #AAIC2025 I'll present work on genetic risk mechanisms in #MS #AD using #CRISPR screens in #microglia. Come see poster as well until 4:30! Co-led by @xochitl-luna.bsky.social, Jaenisch/Corradin labs @whiteheadinstitute.bsky.social. Link to paper: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

This campaign needs you now Petition to Reverse the NIH Indirect Cost Cap (NOT-OD-25-068)

chng.it/r5q28Pkb9D

Who’s going to #AAIC2025 in Toronto?

Looks like a dream job! I will definitely apply, assuming the department isn't opposed to more microglia work 🙂

Am I reading this correctly as applying to remaining FY2025 grants, not 2026?

I think it's been delayed until September

Thank you for doing this. The anecdotes suggest the situation is beyond terrible, but I haven’t seen many proper write ups or analysis of the issue

1/ I strongly dispute the idea that scientists are indoctrinated in anything. The entire experience of being a scientist, from day 1 of grad school, is non-stop discussions of how everything can be wrong, misleading, limited, or non-generalizable. Indoctrination is literally the opposite of science

Uh, what are the alternatives? HeLa cells?

Yes, this

Ah I see, thanks

Richard, we had a paper rejected from BioRxiv due to its focus on human disease genetics. I was wondering if BioRxiv recently changed its scope, as we successfully transferred to medRxiv. Thanks!

3/ non-science, if not falsifiability?

2/ wouldn’t be a scientific theory, and that scientist wouldn’t have done good science in developing that theory. If falsifiability does not distinguish science, then why are Creationism or Intelligent Design not scientific theories? What about astrology? What do you think distinguishes science from

1/ I’ve been arguing what distinguishes science from non-science, not what defines a scientist. Theoretical physicists, as you say, are considered scientists, even though they only use part of the scientific method. However, if one developed a theory that couldn’t even be tested in theory, that

2/ countless wrong ideas throughout the centuries, and this is one of the major ways that our knowledge progresses. Any shape of the Earth other than a sphere has been falsified. You can philosophize about how we might be wrong about that, but then you're just changing what falsify means.

1/ No the definition is just the process, like you said. It's the method. It doesn't require certainty to ever be attainable, and I agree with you that certainty is never attainable. But if you think nothing can be falsified, then I think you're just playing semantic games. Science has falsified

Do you have examples of such untestable theories that made important contributions? I'm fully willing to accept that they exist, but this doesn't remove falsifiability as a central part of science.

You can ignore until it can be tested; until then, you probably won't make much progress on the issue.

2/ method, not completing it. And only by completing it do you make progress. So yes, one can do just one or two parts of the scientific method and call themselves a scientist, but they will never make much progress on their own. I don't think this is controversial epistemologically.

1/ I think kinda supports my point - Nick Bostrom is a philosopher, not a scientist, probably for these exact reasons. Again, coming up with a hypothesis that will be testable *some day* is fine, but the person who came up with it and didn't do the testing was just kinda dabbling in the scientific

33/ We'd love to get feedback from the community #neuroinflammation #multiplesclerosis #Alzheimer #microglia #iPSC #CRISPR #Perturbseq #GWAS #epigenome #neurodegeneration

Functional genomic dissection of MS risk loci reveals convergence of cis and trans gene regulatory mechanisms in microglia Neurological diseases (NDs) are a major source of unmet medical need, and translational insights have been hampered by complex underlying pathophysiologies and limitations of experimental models. Nonc...

32/ we're currently looking more closely at the remaining 4 loci, and are performing functional experiments to see if we can figure out how these genes might be altering microglial phenotypes in MS and related neuroimmune conditions. Paper link: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

31/ We identified the likely causal risk genes at 5/9 MS risk loci, and found that when perturbing these genes, downstream affected pathways were strongly enriched for MS heritability, suggesting regulatory cross-talk between MS risk mechanisms in microglia.