AZ Faust

I don’t know man, as a naturalized citizen myself, something about leopards and faces comes to mind…

I took care of numerous kids with fulminant hepatitis B in the 90s before the switch to getting the first vaccine at birth. I don’t recall having one since. I do not miss caring for that disease.

Just so people understand, Lysenkoism devastated science in the USSR for decades and set them far behind in scientific advancement.

We will be facing similar devastation if this propaganda-based policy is allowed to continue unaddressed.

I was plenty mad about some of the US COVID policies, especially school closures. Like raging mad. I still didn't descend into anti-vax idiocy. It's insane how far these people have fallen in their ability to reason (or they never had any to begin with)

Child mortality rate in the U.S 1800-2020| Statista The child mortality rate in the United States, for children under the age of five, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800.

In 1925, 185 out of every 1,000 children died before the age 5 (that's 2 out of every 10)

In 2020, that number was 7 out of 1,000.

Those steep declines over time? Improved water infrastructure, antibiotics, and vaccines.

www.statista.com/statistics/1...

It's a sh*tshow down here Dawn

Can you imagine the average American, who reads at the 8th grade level, trying to navigate through primary medical literature?

Supreme Court allowed this administration to terminate anything they deem "not aligned with administration priorities." And so, yes, this a very reasonable and valid concern.

Most of them are practicing "functional medicine" and that should be a clue to any patient that they don't know what they are doing.

Also, let's not forget about the guy with a PhD in "logistics" with 0 background in biology or medicine getting a vote here.

This will absolutely kill US children. 1-1.5 million people in this country are walking around with an undiagnosed Hep B infection. But also this is just a blueprint for how they plan to mess with other vaccines.

Not long until US citizens are required to show proof of vaccinations when traveling.

Cohesin drives chromatin scanning during the RAD51-mediated homology search Cohesin folds genomes into chromatin loops, the roles of which are under debate. We found that double-strand breaks (DSBs) induce de novo formation of chromatin loops in human cells, with the loop bas...

Thrilled to share that my postdoc research is published today in @science.org! We found that DNA repair uses cohesin complexes to build new chromatin loops that guide the homology search and boost accurate repair! 1/n
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#ACIP day 2 starts with an opening about how to approach scientific discussions with an eye to rigor.

A lot of phrases and terms commonly used in the scientific community will be continued to be used against the actual evidence base.

Thanks to @flscitriguy.bsky.social for highlighting this - looks like a great series to send to friends and family who may not be in the midst of this chaos daily.

NSF BIO Virtual Office Hour: Updates from the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences Please join the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences for a virtual office hour on Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025, at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

You can register here: www.nsf.gov/events/nsf-b...

From NSF BIO "This virtual office hour will focus on modifications to the merit review process"

Why do I have a bad feeling about this?

Words to live by

Heads up to any pancreatic cancer research that either had their R01 yanked or missed funding due to the newly restrictive paylines in 2025 (specifically anyone who scored 15%ile or below, but didn't get funding). media.pancan.org/rsa/2026/Pan...

Notice of Request for Information; Accelerating the American Scientific Enterprise The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) requests input from all interested parties on Federal policy updates that aim to accelerate the American scientific enterprise, enable groundbreaking...

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is seeking input on Federal policy updates to accelerate the American scientific enterprise.

This is your chance to give some feedback on how the past ~10 months have gone for science.
www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

I plan to highlight:

But that's also why they have high IDC rates - there is no clinical or tuition revenue to fill in the gap.

Also, some of the highest IDC institutions I know are not connected to either teaching or clinical care, meaning that the investigators are 100% dedicated to research. Their investigators can focus on research productivity in ways that their clinical or teaching colleagues can not.

Absolutely - the teams just hadn't coordinated properly at the start. But now we have a new finding and likely a new project so I count this as a win.

Anyway, science is cool and we should have more people doing it.

I just did a deep dive into this biology and it's a complete gap - we don't know anything about these processes in these new systems Team 2 used. And they appear to be very unusual. So we're all understandably excited.

Just had a meeting yesterday with a team (2 labs) where team 1 tried to first replicate findings of team 2 but used different systems and couldn't do it. Then they used the same system and replicated the original finding beautifully. But now we're curious about why the other systems are different

Because you're going to miss out on a lot of really interesting science (and this science we really need to know if we are to solve problems) if we abandon context-dependent biology

Is the question they are trying to answer here with LLMs "which findings will be robust and replicate across systems?"

Given I no longer work in a lab, but work with many labs, my take on the replicability crisis is two-fold:

1) few findings replicate easily across systems - think p53 and cancer or caspases and apoptosis
2) most findings are context dependent because biology is complicated and illogical

The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine (Gift Article) A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.

While the administration has said it is cutting “woke programs” that “poison the minds of Americans", it actually funded fewer grants in every area of science and medicine.

“They brought everything to a stop,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the N.I.H.’s National Cancer Institute

I think this happens a lot. So not a bad idea to update the aims every few months (years? 😬)

Preprint your manuscripts folks. Way more impactful to cite a preprint (that the reviewer can look at if they so choose) than to say "manuscript submitted."