Mike Lee

RFK Jr. has a less-than-zero understanding of how science works. "Make the proof" should be disturbing for anybody who cares about health, truth, or democracy.

Join our fight to impeach RFK Jr. here 👉 www.standupforscience.net/quack-o-gram...

#impeachrfk #impeachthequack

🚨 BREAKING: James Comey posts a video statement following his indictment

"My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump...But I'm not afraid. And I hope you're not either...And I'm innocent. So let's have a trial and keep the faith."

What research might be lost after the NIH’s cuts? Nature trained a bot to find out We used machine-learning tools in an attempt to recreate the method for cutting funding, and then applied it to past US National Institutes of Health grants to reveal the broad-reaching consequences of such action.

We used machine-learning tools in an attempt to recreate the method for cutting funding, and then applied it to past US NIH grants to reveal the broad-reaching consequences

go.nature.com/4pBArFH

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."

Picture of Nick Harper, a graduate student in the Lee Lab at UMass Chan Medical School

A nice Q&A with Nick Harper about the discovery of PDAR, and his road to becoming a scientist @umasschan.bsky.social

www.umassmed.edu/dsb/dsb-comm...

Congrats to Nick Harper and the rest of the team!
7/end 🧪

A 3rd surprise: PDAR accounts for the activity of many cancer drugs, including several that have never been considered transcriptional inhibitors.

Drugs that cause bulky DNA lesions activate many stress pathways… but activating PDAR accounts for their ability to kill cancer cells.
6/n 🧪

The 2nd surprise is related to how PDAR works: cells sense the loss of the hypo-phosphorylated (i.e., not actively transcribing) forms of RNA Pol II.

Yes, this is about loss of gene expression, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with loss of transcriptional activity or loss of RNA 😳
5/n 🧪

With activation of PDAR, cells die proactively. This occurs before cells really experience any stress from the dysregulated gene expression, and the outcome isn’t left to chance.
4/n 🧪

The 1st surprise is simply that PDAR exists.

Intuitively, complete loss of gene expression should be sufficient to kill a cell… and that is true, but it takes a LOOONG time and cells die using an array of different mechanisms (e.g., inflammatory/necrotic, apoptotic, etc.).
3/n 🧪

The image shows the pathway called the Pol II Degradation-dependent Apoptotic Response (PDAR), highlighting the 3 mechanistic steps leading to cell death: Pol II degradation, PTBP1 and BCL2L12 translocation, and activation of cell intrinsic apoptosis

We call this pathway the Pol II Degradation-dependent Apoptotic Response (PDAR).

Our study highlights 3 major surprises about PDAR:

2/n 🧪

RNA Pol II inhibition activates cell death independently from the loss of transcription When RNA polymerase II (RNA Pol II) is inhibited, the inhibition is sensed and signaled to mitochondria, leading to programmed cell death independently of the loss of RNA Pol II transcription activity...

I’m excited to highlight our latest paper, just published in Cell 🎉

We report the existence of a previously uncharacterized signaling pathway that is responsible for activating cell death upon loss of gene expression.

1/n 🧪

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

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...

The Constitutional Crisis Is Here The Supreme Court told the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison. So far, the administration is pretending to comply while re...

What we saw today was two jumped up thugs and their bootlicking sychophants laughing at the US Constitution, the supreme court, and the idea that anyone can stop them from doing anything they want www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

🔥 @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.