Brent Orr

important, perhaps?

Terrible news for pediatric brain tumor research and incredible amount of hard work wasted. This very likely will result in some active trials prematurely closing without sufficient accrual to answer their aims.

SCIMaP - Impacts of Federal Cuts to Science and Medical Research Developed by an interdisciplinary research team, this website shows how funding cuts reduce economic activity and employment nationwide

Important update about local impacts of funding cuts.

Depressing but compelling...

Thanks to @joshuasweitz.bsky.social and his team for putting this together.

scienceimpacts.org

Don't really have a question, just came across this the other day and it sounded about right. I can't even believe this is America right now. We're not well.

How to Survive the A.I. Revolution The Luddites lost the fight to save their livelihoods. As the threat of artificial intelligence looms, can we do any better?

Learning from the Luddites.

The critical challenge of the age of AI: designing an economic system which incentivises the augmentation of human expertise rather than the automation that replaces it.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Pediatric research. When grants are pulled, the infrastructure suffers
www.wcvb.com/article/bost...

The coolest thing I’ve seen today is that a bunch of volunteer public health professionals and developers have restored the CDC website from before January 20th 2025.

This differs from an archive in that they want to rebuild the links between pages and replicate the full website.

you’re fired. wait you’re rehired. email us a list of things you’ve done today wait forget it you’re fired again. come back your job was important. you’re fired. or hired. come in to the office. wait the office has no computers go home. we are the department of government efficiency.

The NIH is Being Slashed and Burned, not “Reformed” A strong and well-argued rebuttal to NIH criticism

www.sensible-med.com/p/the-nih-is... #medsky #cansky

Screen shot of the article

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.

The US gained its international leadership in science (& economic benefits of that leadership) starting in the 1930s when Nazi germany drove away its leading scientists.
The US can lose that leadership in much the same way, which will take many years to recover from.

Oppose RFK
Save NIH/NSF/CDC

PLEASE SHARE 🧪‼️

Since CDC websites and datasets are being taken down by the Administration…

The ENTIRE archive of ALL CDC datasets uploaded BEFORE January 28th, 2025 can be found here: archive.org/details/2025...

What to know about Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s anti-vaccine advocacy Audiences need ongoing, accurate information about Kennedy's beliefs on vaccines and health policy — and what he could do as HHS Secretary.

Great tip sheet for journalists reporting on RFK Jr., by @tarahaelle.bsky.social
🧪 science communication 🛟 medsky