Current NIH leadership want you to think they are using rigorous, consistent & scientific processes to screen studies to align them with agency priorities.
But the process that they have put down on paper is a sham.
It’s important to know NIH is not following its own guidance. Here’s why:
🧵1/
7/ In reality, my colleagues still inside NIH tell me that their assessments are largely ignored.
Once a grant or application is picked up by the tool, they are almost never able to move the grant forward as is - regardless of the scientific justification.
Great perspective by @philipcball.bsky.social.
Elementary genetics teaching (HS/college) focuses on Mendelian traits (single gene => single trait). However, it is now clear that polygenicity and pleiotropy are the norm. Curriculum must change accordingly.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Excited that our work was featured on the local (Bay Area) news for their Black History month series. Interview with Noah and clips from my interview with @dornsife.usc.edu and CGSI talk in the article below
www.nbcbayarea.com/discover-bla...
Sam Trejo and @daphmarts.bsky.social, authors of What We Inherit: How New Technologies and Old Myths Are Shaping Our Genomic Future, write for @livescience.com about new reproductive technologies and the importance of regulation:
Publications which use "national IQ" data still appearing in Springer Nature journals in 2026. Cool cool
doi.org/10.1057/s415...
Fun news! @gcbias.bsky.social and I are teaching a 2-week online population genetics workshop this summer to raise money for the Center for Population Biology at UC Davis. We're trying to gauge interest -- please fill this out if you might be interested! And please share broadly!
I hear you, and: hope, change, etc is non-linear and multi-faceted. I guarantee that the world looks a little bit different to a whole bunch of first year grad students taking notes on scientific activism (it looks different to me, too).
Someone on LinkedIn just asked me "why scientists should care and mobilize" right now.
But the answer is simple: BECAUSE IT IS THE MORALLY RIGHT THING TO DO.
People are being killed in the street, our democracy is being eroded, & we are watching the onset of authoritarianism before our eyes. 1/
To the extent that the fate of NIH and ICE funding may continue to be linked, we as scientists may feel forced to choose between protecting our own funding and the safety and wellbeing of our neighbors.
This is a false choice.
open.substack.com/pub/sciencea...
Relatedly, some cool recent work from @roshnipatel.bsky.social, Jeffrey Spence, @jkpritch.bsky.social et al. dives deep into expectations, based on models of natural selection, for allele frequency in a group B conditional on allele frequency in group A.
academic.oup.com/genetics/art...
(16/27)
Our work on the generalizability of polygenic scores (PGS) from the @arbelharpak.bsky.social Lab is now officially out!
We examine the accuracy of PGS predictions at the individual level. We make 3 observations that expose gaps in our understanding of PGS “portability.”
rdcu.be/e0LAr
(1/27)
🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year.
That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027.
A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications.
A short 🧵
How well does TWAS estimate a gene’s direction of effect on a trait? We think of this as an important stress-test for the accuracy of TWAS.
In a new pre-print, we find that TWAS gets the sign wrong around 20-30% of the time!
doi.org/10.64898/202...
1/n
I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.
Thank you Alex! Excited to see our paper published in @nature.com ! Huge thanks to @jeffspence.github.io , @tkyzeng.bsky.social , @emmamarydann.bsky.social, @nikhilmilind.dev, @marsonlab.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and all the members of the Pritchard and Marson labs for your enormous help!
After time in the Bay Area, I’ve started a new role as Lecturer in the Department of Allergy and Rheumatology at the University of Tokyo. We’re the group of clinicians who see patients with autoimmune diseases, while researching new treatments and patient stratification. (continued)
“What I do think is that it has become normalized in modern behavioral genomics to do what you have to do in order to make every result, no matter how small, look like a win for team genetics”
ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/within-fam...
I taught Genetics again this year. We need to include discussion of the problematic history of our field, especially as the claims of eugenics are once again centered in our political discourse. Last year I wrote this piece, explaining my reasoning and approach 🧪 1/n
www.cell.com/trends/genet...
My first lead author paper is out with Ben Kerr and @alisonfeder.bsky.social! We found that making an antiviral too strong can sometimes make resistance easier to evolve. This has implications for how we design drugs, choose doses, and think about viral evolution in the face of treatment. (1/n)
And this. My experience also supports that being *more* open about racist, sexist, and ableist histories of our fields is more engaging, not less, for students (and faculty) from minoritized backgrounds. Transparency can only enhance rigor.
12 former commissioners of the FDA came together to write a Perspectives piece for the New England Journal of Medicine; raising our concerns about recent changes to vaccine approval policy at the FDA and its implications for patients and public health.
yes don't worry we'll write the rules such that DR EVIL passes with flying colors
I half agree but also I think papers should stop inventing acronyms for niche biological phenomena. tools are fine! but why are we making the reader do the mental legwork of mapping a string of letters to a phrase, and a phrase to a concept, all for something that nobody in the field will reuse??
There's a bit more in this thread about how the GRM relates to existing methods -- happy to chat more as well, I'd of course be curious to know what you think
Re: your Q about types of confounding - the GRM helps control for pleiotropy too! Using the GRM, we separate trait correlation mediated through genetics from that independent of genetics (via bivariate GREML, essentially), and doing so allows us to control for pleiotropy-induced confounding
...and since the environment of Black British individuals in UKB isn't identical to that of individuals in AoU, I'm not sure I would expect to estimate the same effect. But it's possible!
Thanks Gen! Definitely curious about analyzing in All of Us. I do think exposure effects should be interpreted as cohort-specific rather than population-specific, since I imagine what's happening is social and environmental context modifying the effect of e.g. loneliness on WBC
It was a total pleasure to work with @roshnipatel.bsky.social on this, who really led the charge in all respects. Anyone interested in learning about the intersection of population genetics and statistical genetics should check out her new lab in Oregon!
here's hoping! and thanks for the kind words!
