PombeDoc

Proud to be an MIT alum today.

MIT rejects Trump administration deal for priority federal funding MIT is one of the nine schools that were asked to agree to adopt conservative priorities and policies in exchange for funding perks.

This is what courage in the face of authoritarianism looks like. No university should take Trump's bribe & surrender their integrity — bending the knee to a bully only feeds the beast & puts ALL our rights at risk.

Others should follows MIT’s example ASAP.

MacArthur Foundation Announces 2025 ‘Genius Grant’ Winners

Craig Taborn is a genius, and a Genius: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/a...

Nobel committee unable to reach prize winner who is ‘living his best life’ hiking off grid Fred Ramsdell was among those honoured with a 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine but might not know because he is somewhere in Idaho and uncontactable

when you try and get your PhD advisor to review your manuscript 😂

Medicine Nobel goes to three researchers who identified immune system’s security guards Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi discovered regulatory T cells that prevent autoimmune disease

This year’s #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to three scientists for discovering how the immune system distinguishes friend from foe. https://scim.ag/3Wt5rdi

A photo of rows of monkey skulls in wooden boxes in a museum collection.

Opinion | Anything but Basic

The push to reduce spending on foundational research is shortsighted, Tesla A. Monson and Marianne F. Brasil write. https://bit.ly/4nZ4BAX

#AcademicSky #HigherEd #EDUSky

🤬

And please also thank the grants management specialists (GMS) who handle the business, non-programmatic matters of awarding grants!

Genomically matched therapy in advanced solid tumors: the randomized phase 2 ROME trial - Nature Medicine In the proof-of-concept phase 2 ROME trial, comprehensive genomic profiling followed by molecular tumor board evaluation and randomization of patients with metastatic solid cancer to receive personalized therapy or standard of care led to a significantly higher objective response rate and longer progression-free survival in patients who received personalized therapy.

A randomized trial of patients with advanced cancer who had genomically matched treatment vs standard of care showed substantial outcome improvement for the former
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video

Closeup of interior of a yellow flower

it may feel a little like homework, but i genuinely think people should read the lincoln-douglas debates to see what the practical politics of anti-slavery looked like in an environment where the public was neutral to hostile to the question of emancipation

Super happy to see also this story out! 👇

7 years of amazing perseverance from @gaowen.bsky.social, who not only performed experimental evolution showing tradeoff between sexual and asexual reproduction, but also identified all key transcription and genome changes.

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

The GRFP announcement from NSF cuts out an entire cohort of 2nd year students from consideration, without warning. This is so deeply unfair that it warrants a formal protest from the scientific community. If someone wants to work with me to craft an open letter and solicit signatures, LMK.

"in the largest sample of medical advances for which we have good data...we found extensive connections between medical advances and research that was funded by grants that would have been cut if the NIH budget was sharply reduced."

Really cool, conceptually simple approach here: cross-referencing grant proposal scores with literature citations and explicit acknowledgments in drug patents to identify patents linked to projects that wouldn't have been funded given a smaller budget

Super excited that this story by @borissieber.bsky.social is now on BioRxiv!

For decades, we thought there was no MAPK scaffold for the ERK-like cascade that promotes sexual reproduction in fission yeast ... until Boris found it !

See the thread 👇 and enjoy the paper!

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

NEW: Nature trained AI to predict which NIH grants from 2014 would have been cut if the Trump admin had its way back then — and what science would have been lost to history.

"The results show the damage that cuts in funding can do to research, and the unpredictable nature of the research process."

What if NIH had been 40% smaller? Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

This is interesting — in a paper out today, researchers created an alternate history to estimate what Trump's desired cuts to NIH would look like. Of 557 drugs approved 2000-2023, *more than half* are at least partially linked to NIH research that would have not happened under a 40% reduction.

Kimmel’s refusal to capitulate stands out because so many other well-situated people—those with the resources, platform, and power to stand up to the president, including, initially, the leaders of ABC—have surrendered, withdrawn, or become Trump sycophants themselves. One by one, American leaders supposedly committed to principles of free speech, due process, democracy, and equality have abandoned those ideals when menaced by the Trump administration. These cascading acts of cowardice from the people best positioned to resist Trump’s authoritarian power grabs have made Trump seem exponentially more powerful than he actually is, sapping strength from others who might have discovered the courage to stand up. Defending democracy requires a collective refusal to acquiesce to lawless behavior from many different sectors of society. All of these powerful people trying to save their own skin have effectively multiplied Trump’s attacks on constitutional government, by enhancing a false sense of inevitability and invincibility.

Kimmel’s defiant return highlights one of the most disturbing dynamics of Trump II, that so many people in positions of leadership are chickenshit frauds who would rather fold in advance than put up anything resembling a fight www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

. @adamserwer.bsky.social is correct. A major difference between Trump I and II is that lots of people decided not to fight this time around. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

The degree to which those comments can undermine public health, do harm to women who are pregnant, create anxiety for parents who do have children who are autistic – is violence against the truth.

Not mRNA, it’s micro or miRNA

Miraculous regardless

How about you work on saving Democracy.

Those are the folks who have options and a market. Also need to factor in those who will retire early or go to industry. I’m seeing both of those.

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

By munching on fermented fruit, chimpanzees consume the equivalent of roughly 1 alcoholic drink per day, new #ScienceAdvances research finds. https://scim.ag/4nIu55z

Be our new colleague! 🎉
The Dept of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Geneva is hiring an Assistant Professor or Associate Professor.

👉 More details here: lnkd.in/e8Z9eAm4
👉 Our department: mocel.unige.ch

Please feel free to share this opportunity with your network.

But starting in the late 1980s, that investment in basic science began to pay off, driving a revolution in the molecular biology of cancer. Though it took decades, the cancer investment increase in the 1970s has led to a cornucopia of new cancer cures today. Immunotherapies, CAR-T cell treatments, checkpoint inhibitors, and precision drug targeting are all a product of that basic science work. And that progress has contributed to increased quality of life. Between 1991 and 2019, the risk of dying of cancer dropped by 31%. This is a common story for basic scientific research: it's a long-term investment, one that only governments have the time horizon to make, and it brings enormous payoffs. The payoffs are both economic, generating jobs, and in better health, generating cures. And the US scientific research system is complex, painstakingly constructed, and easy to

The VC model is the antithesis of good basic science.

Basic science is best when many labs are funded over the long-term, when many different scientists pursue their own ideas. Let a thousand flowers bloom —and support them.

VC investment is about relentless, exponential growth.