Steve Joffe

15 teens. 300 miles. One mighty ancestral river, running free. The removal of four dams finally made a descent of the Klamath possible. These Indigenous kayakers became the first to attempt it.

Something positive for the weekend.

OMG.

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years.

Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

Article also fails to note that, if the goal is to prevent severe monogenic disease, preimplantation genetic testing/embryo selection is already available.

It's very hard to find the use case for why we need gene editing to do this.

The Center for Practical Ethics at @olemiss.bsky.social is hiring a Director of Strategic Ethics Education Initiatives. The Center "models and facilitates civil discourse" and "develops the skills needed for character-building". PhD in philosophy a plus!

Job listing can be found in the link below:

This is a crime.

I can’t put it any other way.

More than a dozen states sue to protect gender-affirming care from federal investigations A new lawsuit argues that the Trump administration is pursuing a backdoor strategy to restrict gender-affirming care nationally, while skirting state laws.

AGs suing the Trump administration argue that these actions are not based in law, since no federal statute prohibits gender-affirming care in the United States. Instead, these actions are an intimidation tactic to suppress the health care, the lawsuit alleges.

19thnews.org/2025/08/gend...

August 2025 Sign-on Letter Made with Fillout, the best way to make forms, surveys and quizzes your audience will answer.

'Crimson Courage' is urging Harvard *not* to knuckle under to Trump protection-money demands, as Columbia and Brown have

Started as Harvard-alum movement, now seeking support from all who care about acad independence

Can read and sign letter here. (We have)
crimsoncourage.fillout.com/august-letter

White House letter demanding drug companies lower prices to MFN levels for the US (along with other demands)

17 drug companies just got this letter. We're now on to White House vs pharma in addition to White House vs auto OEMs, White House vs dropshippers, White House vs the construction and hospitality industry, etc.

No, You Can’t Design Your Baby—And Trying Would Be a Terrible Idea A genomics firm saying they can help parents with “genetic optimization” of their embryos is tone-deaf Silicon Valley marketing trampling over legitimate science. Parents should be wary

Excellent takedown of Nucleus Embryo by Arthur Caplan and James Tabery. The problem with Nucleus isn't eugenics. It is rescued from its own eugenic intentions by the fact that it won't work. It is bogus science.

Nor why many people have donated to Harvard over the past few months.

to Jews, on the Gaza famine an open letter: we have been commanded

I just sent this out.

The Jewish people have moral frameworks for this moment.

It is a choice not to heed them.

Please let us meet this moment, let us see the shattered Temple around us, right now, and our responsibility to it.

when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet

Difficulty With Binary Voting Among FDA Oncology Advisory Committee Members This qualitative study investigates the frequency of reports of difficulty in voting for drug approval by members of the Food and Drug Administration Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee.

Check out our paper in @jamanetworkopen.com, which examined how onc adcom members feel about the difficulty of binary voting. <1/10 statements indicated a difficult vote w/ the most common rationales for difficulty being unconvincing post hoc analysis + unmet pt need.
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Everybody should read David Pozen on the Columbia "deal": balkin.blogspot.com/2025/07/regu...

Gaza is starving. Where are the American Jewish leaders? A fear of being labelled antisemitic still deters American Jews and Jewish institutions from taking a position that is morally correct.

forward.com/opinion/7575...

(My thoughts in the Forward about why anyone who cares about Israel or the Jewish people should be speaking out on Gaza)

Whatever the motivation for this NIH policy revision, I'm pleased to see a clear statement that race & ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs (though I'm not sure what is intended by "not anthropological in nature" – not biological?).

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

My research was possible because of a career development grant from the NIH. The NIH directly and indirectly (via training grants) supported much of the work in this article.

The NIH supports basic science...and it supports research to make sure all of us can benefit from those discoveries.

Important letter.

Wish there were more of this from Jewish members of university communities and from their organizations, including Hillels.

Pursuing Fair and Just Compensation for Research Participants: An Open Letter to the Research Ethics Community Published in The American Journal of Bioethics (Vol. 25, No. 7, 2025)

More here, in this open letter (unpaywalled), which I signed. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Medical research participants deserve to be paid well It’s increasingly clear that “payment conservativism” — avoiding paying too much to medical research participants — is the wrong approach.

This in @statnews.com from Jill Fisher and Jake Eberts is right.

www.statnews.com/2025/07/17/m...

Dems Must Really Fix Medicaid, Not Just Undo Trump’s Damage to It The party should use this as an opportunity to build toward universal coverage—working from these seven principles for reforming health care.

Compelling vision for the future of Medicaid in @thebulwark.com from @zekeemanuel.bsky.social.

Feels far off but it’s important to look around the corner, not just at what’s staring us in the face.

www.thebulwark.com/p/democrats-...

Also, it's a mistake to call it a health clinic. Snake-oil center would be closer to the truth.

Physical Therapist Dies Inside Hyperbaric Chamber After It Catches Fire

"He is at least the second person to die this year after a fire broke out in a hyperbaric chamber... on its website, the Arizona clinic appears to advertise hyperbaric oxygen therapy for a variety of treatments that are not yet approved by the [FDA], including anti-aging and autism treatments."

Though the Anti-Defamation League claims to protect civil rights for all, when the targets aren't Jewish or Israeli, it's gone mute. www.adl.org/resources/pr...

Endorse, from @nytopinion.nytimes.com Linda Greenhouse.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/o...

Endorse, from Linda Greenhouse @nytopinion.nytimes.com.

Interestingly, this physician has faced prior disciplinary action from the Board. db.dopl.utah.gov/disciplinary...

Self-regulation is central to what makes medicine a profession.

In the US, state licensing boards are where the self-regulation rubber meets the road.

Criminal proceedings aside, the Utah State Medical Board could take action here.

Passing on an announcement:

CITAP at UNC-Chapel Hill is looking for a faculty position in AI, namely someone who "examines the complex interconnections between AI technologies and social, organizational, and/or ethical systems."

unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/303...