Kim Tolias

‘Congress has your back’: US senators tell scientists they want to protect NIH budget Senate budget bill includes small increase for the health-research agency — but faces a long road before being signed into law.

‘Congress has your back’: US senators tell scientists they want to protect NIH budget
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A functional perspective on astrocyte heterogeneity Astrocytes are glial cells of the central nervous system (CNS) that perform an array of diverse functions that are essential for brain activity. Studies on the functional diversity of astrocytes sugge...

A functional perspective on astrocyte heterogeneity
www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

My quote of the day

A Video Quote

Medical miracles don't happen overnight. You have to invest in them. Our investments are in trouble.

(From Francis Collins on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, July 16, 2025)

Nobel laureate on how Trump's cuts are hurting science Neuroscientist, biologist and 2021 Nobel Prize winner Ardem Patapoutian joined Midday Edition to talk about how the Trump administration's effort to cut back on science spending is impacting researche...

I spoke with Jade Hindmon, host of @kpbssandiego.bsky.social Midday Edition, about the consequences of the current administration’s cuts to science funding. Please share to help spread the word and raise awareness.
www.kpbs.org/podcasts/kpb...

Yas! Parent F32 (PA-25-423) and F30s (PA-25-426, PA-25-425) are also published.
simpler.grants.gov

These are not just grants. This is thousands of people who devoted their lives and careers - taking pay cuts, working long hours, living with uncertainty - all for the chance to try to make people's lives a bit better for you and your loved ones. This breaks my heart.

NIH indirect cost cuts will affect the economy and employment - Nature Human Behaviour Nature Human Behaviour - NIH indirect cost cuts will affect the economy and employment

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Every $1 spent on NIH funding returns nearly $3 to the economy - an almost 200% return on investment💰.
Also 99% of drugs developed 2010-2019 were funded by NIH ‼️🤯
Cutting NIH funding not only hurts the economy but will hurt families and patients 😔💔

Ardem Patapoutian's story is not just the American dream, it is the dream of American science. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1986 at age 18 after fleeing war-torn Lebanon. He spent a year writing for an Armenian newspaper and delivering Domino's at night to become eligible for the University of California, where he earned his undergraduate degree and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. He started a lab at Scripps Research in San Diego with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, discovered the way humans sense touch, and in 2021 won the Nobel Prize. But with the Trump administration slashing spending on science, Dr. Patapoutian's federal grant to develop new approaches to treating pain has been frozen. In late February, he posted on Bluesky that such cuts would damage biomedical research and prompt an exodus of talent from the United States. Within hours, he had an email from China, offering to move his lab to "any city, any university I want," he said, with a guarantee of funding for the next 20 years.

Man comes to the US from Lebanon. Starts out delivering pizzas, becomes a Nobel winning neuroscientist. Trump freezes his funding, he gets an email from China offering to move his lab “any city, any university I want" with guaranteed funding for 20 years.

What are we doing?

Senator Ossoff speaking the truth. We need real action

It is hard to conceive of a more anti-American policy choice for US innovation and prosperity in the 21st century.

ASSIGNMENT: COMMENT ON SCHEDULE F

1 week left to comment about Schedule F, potentially making NIH institute and center director essentially political appointees.

www.regulations.gov/commenton/OP...

1/n

Huge congratulations to @franciscoblanco.bsky.social (PhD) and Topher Cronkite (MD/PhD) for earning their degrees! Mentoring such outstanding students has been a true honor! Can't wait to see the amazing things they'll do next! @bcmneurosci.bsky.social @bcm-mstp.bsky.social #BCMGraduation

YouTube video by Amanpour and Company Breakthrough Prize-Winning Biochemist on the Deadly Cost of Funding Cuts | Amanpour and Company

David Liu @harvard.edu beautifully articulates the criticality of basic science funding for developing revolutionary therapeutics like life-saving base editors 👏

youtu.be/8YhJM6zxYDw?...

Harvard today, your institution tomorrow.

It's all part of the Project 2025 plan to destroy high education in America.

All leading US universities depend on federal funding and tuition dollars from international students. They severely curtailed the former. Now they're eliminating the latter.

DURBIN: How can we give hope to people across the country who are suffering from so many diseases when our government is cutting back on that research?

RFK Jr: I do not know about any cuts to ALS research

D: I just read them to you!

R: I didn't know about them until you told me about them

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

ROI for NIH and NSF for local economies is conservatively 4x, often close to 10x

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

Why We Need the National Institutes of Health NIH has historically received bipartisan support. We should all be advocating for continued federal funding for biomedical research.

On why we need the NIH.

www.physiology.org/publications...

We have updated our database of funding opportunities for Early-Career Researchers (private foundations, federal, international)

We have 456 entries, for which we provide $ amount, deadline, eligibility criteria, etc.

Download this massive database here for free: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

"The biomedical research cuts when they’re polled are like 70-30 or 80-20 against. But it’s only on the edges of the news. You want to push it to the center of the news...Let’s have that vote. Push this issue to the top of the news feed and make Republicans own these cuts."

Because no one spends as much on science as the US does, destroying NIH, NSF, NOAA, NASA, EPA, USDA, USGS, etc. is leading to a brain drain, but it's not to other countries but rather from science. This senseless destruction of US science will hurt the US and the world for a very long time.

The Human Genome Project cost taxpayers $3 Billion.

Two decades on, it has generated a staggering return on investment of $1 Trillion, with benefits in medicine, agriculture, energy, the environment, & more.

If you want to boost the economy, funding science is one of the best things you could do.

Budget released today:
40% cut to NIH
50% cut to NSF
If enacted, this will destroy academic research in the United States. It will also have a major trickle down effect on the entire academic ecosystem

This is chilling. The slowing of grant funding to a crawl could, through recission later this year, result in drastically reduced FY25 funding that provides the excuse for drastically reduced science funding going forward. The copy-paste of this strategy to #NSF and others seems likely.
🧪#ChemSky

Moreover, these funds serve the public interest. Universities do things private companies with research capacities cannot: train research talent, conduct basic research with uncertain payoffs, and distribute knowledge as a public good. And the rewards have been enormous. Everything from the internet to pharmaceutical and health care innovations evolved from such investments. We are richer and healthier for the investment.

The trope that universities are "dependent" on the federal government fundamentally misunderstands how vital this partnership has been for the US. The private sector can't replace it. If we kill it, we're all worse off. From @donmoyn.bsky.social and me: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/are-univer...

Our Health ROI Explore how your tax dollars fund life‑saving medical research.

Ever wonder how many lives have been saved by NIH-funded research - including your own? Enter any medical condition and instantly see how your tax dollars transformed science into survival.

www.ourhealthroi.com

Enigma hiring Research Engineer: Multi-Modal Modeling in Stanford, CA | LinkedIn Posted 11:42:35 PM. The modeling team at Enigma is seeking ML Research Engineers to build and scale the next generation…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

Join me, @andreastolias.bsky.social, and many of the incredible MICrONS team members in an AI-driven approach to neuroscience discovery

Apply here: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/42...

Or email us at recruiting@enigmaproject.ai

The MICrONS Project An unprecedented dataset of high resolution anatomical images of individual cells in mouse visual cortex, mapped on to their responses. This integrated view of function and structure lays a foundation...

After 7 years, thrilled to finally share our #MICrONS functional connectomics results!

We recorded activity from ~75K neurons in the visual cortex of a single mouse, then mapped its wiring using electron microscopy.

nature.com/immersive/d42859-025-00001-w/index.html

This is the way to fight back. Not just rejecting illegal demands, but also arguing affirmatively for the value of university research.

McCormick and Fetterman were supposed to do a book tour appearance in Pittsburgh, but canceled at the last minute because they heard people would be protesting. We showed up anyway. The book is about mentoring. As mentors, we are concerned. With @ahmarilab.bsky.social and @goldpainlab.bsky.social