Roshni Patel

"Women letter writers use less doubt language, fewer personal pronouns, more other pronouns, and a more positive tone than men."

Notes from Beethoven’s genome Wesseldijk et al. compare the genomic information collected from Ludwig van Beethoven with population-based datasets used to quantify musical achievement.

If someone you know buys into claims about "genetic optimization" of embryos using polygenic scores of cognition, just send them our 2024 paper on Beethoven & musicality. We wrote it to help communicate limits of individual-level genetic predictions & complexity of links between DNA & behaviour. 🧪👇

thanks Rachel ❤️

thank you, Shoumita! and yes, likewise. :)

thank you Jonathan!!

🚨 Our parent-of-origin study is out in Nature! 🧬
Maternal and paternal alleles can have distinct — even opposite — effects on human traits, revealing a hidden layer of genetic architecture that standard GWAS miss.
🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Highlights below!

thanks Jeff!! It is an absolute joy to be starting our labs at the same time 👯

Assistant Professor position in Traditional Ecological Knowledge at Stanford University. Applications due Sept 30, 2025

facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49...

And, of course, the fact that it's not really possible should be a good reason not to sell it!

aw, thank you so much Eleanor! good luck with the move, I'm very excited to hear about the postdoc!

Another uncritical puff piece that lacks the bare minimum in checking the science. And to pit ethicists against parents/ kids...detestable.

"Move fast and break things has not worked very well for Silicon Valley in health care (...) the things you are breaking are babies." - @hankgreely.bsky.social

or require proof of safety and efficacy, which would prevent their sale now. That's the easy solution, now and for an unknown time forward. If it did work, the discussion gets trickier, but we don't need to reach that now.

Human embryo editing against disease is unsafe and unproven - despite rosy predictions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39779987/ - with @hankgreely.bsky.social and @shaicarmi.bsky.social

"Move fast and break things has not worked very well for Silicon Valley in health care," said Hank Greely, a Stanford University bioethicist. "When you talk about reproduction, the things you are breaking are babies. So I think that makes it even more dangerous and even more sinister."

All kinds of eugenics cheerleaders quoted in the piece. Thank goodness for more sober minds, like @hankgreely.bsky.social:

A detail just slipped in towards the end, that the woman leading one of these companies (Cathy Tie) is He Jiankui's ex-wife... 🤔

thanks so much, Grant!

thank you Sedona!!

We'll primarily work at the intersection of statistical and population genetics, and we also have active projects related to the ethical and social implications of human genetics (ELSI). Please get in touch if that's a combination that sounds interesting to you!

Bittersweet to be leaving @docedge.bsky.social after a wonderful postdoc, but excited to share that I'm joining @uoregon.bsky.social next month as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Data Science.

GitHub - RILAB/statements: Successful Job Applications and Grants Successful Job Applications and Grants. Contribute to RILAB/statements development by creating an account on GitHub.

New additions in fellowships, industry, and academic jobs! If you've recently gotten a fellowship or a job (research, industry, PUI) please consider contributing your application materials. It's a helpful resource for those on the job market! github.com/RILAB/statem...

Stanford has not always conducted itself honorably as an institution, but I am daily awed by the levels of principle and commitment that exist among our students.

How your genes interact with your environment changes your disease risk − new research counts the ways Environmental factors such as lifestyle and the medications you take influence the effects your genes have on your body − and can clarify how diseases develop.

Arun Durvasula, PhD, of @uscpphs.bsky.social writes, "Lifestyle factors play a large role in determining who gets a disease and who doesn’t. But they are far from the entire story."

A fascinating read about the relationship between genetics and our environment. ⬇️ 🔗

#Science #MedSky #ResearchSky

evergreen tweet but especially relevant in light of recent events

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.

lmao of course they did

I cannot imagine thinking that the supposed marginal benefit of an IQ improvement of 5 points outweighs the harms of genetic determinism....... can researchers please try doing some moral calculus once in a while

Alex Strudwick Young @AlexTISYoung · 3h The widget pictured below gives you the expected range of predicted IQs (or disease risks) for the number of embryos. The difference between the average and the highest gives you the expected gain in IQ if you were selecting the embryo with the highest predicted IQ. The spread does not depend on the mean you choose. The mean IQ you put in is actually the genotypic mean IQ of the parents (as we state) as we didn't want to get into the complexities of modeling regression to the mean in this widget, although we do of course model regression to the mean in our customer reports. We will be detailing rigorous validation of our IQ predictor in an upcoming publications, along with lots of other exciting science. -Quote tweeting the nazi Jordan Lasker (Cremieux) saying: "The latest embryo selection company is live, and guess what: They're publicly letting people select for IQ!"

New snake oil just dropped

And proudly boosting the nazi approval, bold business strategy!

Screenshot of Columbia's settlement with the White House

Columbia University has handed over its undergraduate admissions process to Donald Trump and his MAGA allies, who will now decide at their sole discretion whether the university has admitted enough white people. It's no longer an independent institution.

People often intuitively interpret genetic ancestry PCA plots as simple genetic distances, but this is not always the case. Below are random pairs of individuals that are far apart in PCA space (lines) but actually have fewer total variant differences (numbers).

Nahoft – Navona Records Drawing its name from a melodic motif found in Iranian music, NAHOFT is the culmination of pianist Ava Nazar’s collaboration with the Iranian Female Composers Association, showcasing six woman compose...

A brief musical note: I’m very excited to share that my brilliant wife, a pianist and composer, has just released her debut album featuring works by Iranian women composers, including one of her own. Here is the link in case you’d like to take a listen: www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv67...