Mike Lee

Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End America’s run as the premiere techno-superpower may be over.

For who still thinks this can’t happen here… it’s already happening.
www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

awesome work Steve and team!

"[A] sleeper issue is the proposed 40 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health, in the White House’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year."

Perhaps injecting some economic impact data may help awaken what should not be a sleeper issue... @prospect.org

scienceimpacts.org/fy26

The Lee Lab at Paint Nite at Nu Kitchen in Worcester, MA

Things have been challenging over these last few months, but we also had a lot to celebrate...

Tiana and Mika joining the lab 🎉,
Kelly passing her QE 🎉,
Gavin publishing a paper and submitting another 🎉,
Megan publishing a paper 🎉,
Nick getting excellent reviews 🎉

...so we did a paint nite.

Trump’s new ‘gold standard’ rule will destroy American science as we know it | Colette Delawalla The new executive order allows political appointees to undermine research they oppose, paving the way to state-controlled science

Trump’s new ‘gold standard’ rule will destroy American science as we know it" by Colette Delawalla (@cdelawalla.bsky.social), Victor Ambros, Carl Bergstrom, Carol Greider, Michael Mann and Brian Nosek for @theguardian.com: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Trump’s NIH And NSF Cuts Estimated To Cost The U.S. Economy $10 Billion Annually Economists find public R&D drives U.S. productivity growth — and pays for itself

www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

Not that anyone asked, but during my tenure on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, under part of Obama-2 and all of Trump-1, we visited Military Bases domestically & abroad.

At no time did any member of the Armed Forces I met say to me: “America needs less science funding.”

Grants on antibiotic resistance (and many other things) cancelled "due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students."

Every single Jewish org needs to stand up and speak clearly against this weaponization of antisemitism

"People should not take medical advice from me" ~ the man directly in charge of medical advice for the United States

Inside the Bloodbath at the NIH Sources say that a climate of fear has spread throughout the agency as the Trump administration takes a hatchet to its core functions.

www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Set aside the headline, this is a good primer on the how the federal govt wanted higher Ed to take on a bigger research role, and funded the infrastructure to make that possible via merit-based peer reviewed processes. The research funding is not entitlements and cutting it comes w real costs

Yyyyyyeeeeessssssa!!!! We are finally standing up!!!!!!!!!!!!

Harvard steps up

www.harvard.edu/research-fun...

🔥 @ninajankowicz.com: "Mr Taibbi said when he was first searching through the so-called Twitter files he didn't know what he was looking at. Well, he still doesn't. Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works."

Here, with breakdown by type of F award. These kinds of training grants are essential to support the academic workforce pipeline. These grants are paying the salaries of the ppl who do the work

Opinion | Hillary Clinton: This Is Just Dumb (Gift Article) The Signal group chat is only the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration.

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/o...

JFC, Fulbright scholar not accused of any crime, no immigration violation, no reason to expect any violence -- just Marco Rubio's whim -- and instead of summoning her first step is no-uniform / no-ID guys in masks and hoodies grabbing her off a public street.

Six masked agents in street clothes disappearing a Tufts Ph.D. student in broad daylight on the streets of Somerville. There is video footage out there every person should watch.

Some pretty stunning answers here from DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar in today's interview with NPR's Michel Martin, in which Edgar equates pro-Palestinian protests with terrorist activity and can't point to any crime committed by Mahmoud Khalil: npr.org/2025/03/13/n...

NIH Grants Fueled $95 Billion In FY 2024 Economic Activity, Finds New Report National Institutes of Health grants generated almost $95 billion in economic activity nationwide in FY 2024 according to a new report by United for Medical Research.

New report shows that NIH grants fueled $95 billion in economic activity and 407,782 jobs in 2024.

That's not to mention the countless lives that biomedical research has saved.

Show me a better investment than that.
www.forbes.com/sites/michae...

NIH In Your State - United For Medical Research Select a state on the map to see the impact of NIH funding across America.

Data for every State can be found here:
3/3

www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-...

By crushing cancer research, what are Elon & Trump making more efficient?

Their NIH funding cuts are illegal—so instead, they're suffocating the grant approval process for cancer researchers with so much red tape that labs & clinical trials will be forced to shut down.

NIH funding creates medicines, jobs and economic growth

For a few drugs we have some understanding about why Pol II would degrade (but it wasn’t clear that this is why those drugs are lethal to cells). CHX is a good example… blocks translation so all proteins are expected to decay. But the death appears to be caused by Pol II decay. Lots to learn!

Hey Jamie, yes! Based on some of the results in our study we’ve just started looking. Stimuli that activate RSR also activate PDAR. As you highlighted, dose and time resolved studies should help us determine the functional relationship between these responses.

Our genetic screen gave us some clues. Pol II loss results in cytoplasmic translocation of PTBP1 (required for the death). We’re thinking of Pol II as a nuclear “tether” for PTBP1. Considering other stress response pathways (DDR, UPR, etc) might be a decade of work from many labs to fully resolve

Thanks Deeepak! We haven’t tried any other Pol II subunits yet, just Rpb1 (delta CTD). Will be interesting to try. Re: UV, very insightful question! It appears the lethality of UV is also caused by Pol II degradation (the paper has 4NQO but we have done UV and seem the same thing).

we studied how cells die when you turn off their ability to express genes. it ends up having nothing to do with the loss of gene expression. There's a surveillance pathway in our cells that monitors if the gene expression machinery exists that controls this decision.