Viviana Oldfield-June

NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.

WIRED is interested in what jobs are being cut at HHS. If you're one of the 10,000 HHS staffers affected by the layoffs, feel free to reach out. You can find me on Signal at emullin.06 or email me at emily_mullin@wired.com.

This is incredibly fucked.

It is worth paying close attention to the new bill "Dangerous Viral Gain of Function Research Moratorium Act" introduced by Senator Roger Marshall.

If enacted, it will effectively stop all of virological research, including for vaccines.

www.marshall.senate.gov/wp-content/u...

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The Democrats on the House Science Committee have set up a website to collect stories from fired federal employees, anonymously if desired. Please amplify. (This helps the lawyers establish standing for bringing legal cases against the administration!)

democrats-science.house.gov/sciencefirings

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

BIPOC Scientists Marie Clark Taylor was born in Pennsylvania on February 16 th , 1911, when the world was still highly segregated. Yet, she would go on to become one of the United States’ most successful educators...

Dr. Marie Clark Taylor was the first Black woman to earn a PhD in #botany, studying the impact of photoperiod on plant development.

www.plantcellatlas.org/bipoc-scient...

#28DaysOfBlackSTEMHistory
#BlackHistoryMonth

ATTENTION

If you are someone who had an F31-Diversity (or similar) application submitted this cycle, please DM me here, contact me on signal (jeremymberg.78), or email me at jeremymberg@gmail.com.

I will keep all information confidential.

2/n

Lost my CDC contract after a visit from DOGE. I feel like I’m in the dirt (or TBH eating a pint of ice cream on a couch crying). But here’s the thing: Pushing people down—especially those with heart, purpose, and love for public service—doesn’t mean they stay down. It’s literally against their DNA.

This is absolute insanity.

In which I provide links to archived versions of every CDC.gov page available pre-purge (Part 1 of 15) As horrific as it is that the Trump/Musk Administration is purging data from federal websites, it's good to know that the Internet Archive has been archiving much of it. However, in addition to the Ar...

📣 UPDATE: OK, still working with some others to figure out the best way to present it all, but in the meantime here's the first batch of links to the most-recent archived versions of every page at the CDC prior to the Trump/Musk Purge:

acasignups.net/25/02/02/whi...

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