Les Sutton

Do not let any LLM serve as a form of epistemic grounding for society.

We truly live in the age of miracles that our ancestors could only dream of, and our response has been to try to ruin people's lives, destroy the ecosystem that creates breakthroughs, and end scientific career pathways to make sure our children don't get anything like this.

So this happened... Useful if you want to make economic (and health) arguments about the importance of NIH.

QE sponsored by BeatKing

y'know I always thought scientists had some serious stuff goin in their headphones but I've been sat writing this specific aims for the last 2 hours blaring some krumping remixes and 2000's rap and I'm all the more productive

when Camus wrote about Sisyphus he was talking about my PI convincing me my idea isn't silly and is worth investing into for the 80th time this week

DaniocellDesktop logo, depicting a fish on a laptop screen.

If you love Daniocell, but wish it could generate analyses specific to YOUR genes & cell types of interest, check out DaniocellDesktop - a new point-and-click app for Mac and Windows that enables reanalysis of the Daniocell data without programming: daniocell.nichd.nih.gov/desktop/ (1/4)

When Camus wrote about Sisyphus he was talking about analyzing all the data you collected in your experiments

✨#FluorescenceFriday brings you a glowing Berghia stephanieae juvenile! This stunning sea slug is lit up with Anti-α-Tubulin 🟢, revealing the dense network of cilia that help it glide across surfaces. 🐌💫 Image taken by @Luiza-O-Saad.bsky.social
#Microscopy #DevBio

Popup for plugin. Says "can't you Google that?" And the options are "yeah..." Or "I want ai" Yeah redirects to google while ai continues to your entered ai client url

Got bored at work and made an anti-AI plugin for Firefox called Can't You Google That?

Go to ai site, autopopulates a new tab that prompts you to maybe reconsider

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/androi...

Multiplex and multimodal mapping of variant effects in secreted proteins via MultiSTEP - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Multiplexed assays of variant effect can resolve clinical variants but are incompatible with secreted proteins. Here Popp et al. develop MultiSTEP, a generalizable surface-tethering method to assess v...

I’m thrilled to share my first big paper is live on @nature.com SMB! I poured my heart into this project while I was a tech, and I’m so happy it’s out in the world now.

Plus, how often does someone get to say they published with their two best friends? 🎉

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Multiplex and multimodal mapping of variant effects in secreted proteins via MultiSTEP - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Multiplexed assays of variant effect can resolve clinical variants but are incompatible with secreted proteins. Here Popp et al. develop MultiSTEP, a generalizable surface-tethering method to assess v...

So so so proud of my friend @rachelbiology.bsky.social on her publication in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology working on understanding variant pathogenicity in secreted proteins!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

reminder, bsky has a clever way to display pronouns that's built in!

but you only see them if you yourself opt in, so please feel free to here by subscribing and then choosing which applies!!

@pronouns.diy

We need Pride because in the year 2025 people (in this case actor Jonathon Joss, you may recognize him from his role in Parks and Recreation) are still being murdered in what was allegedly a homophobic hate crime.

Facebook post from his husband:

Support Skype a Scientist! By Skype a Scientist

If you wanna join the monthly squad of people supporting us so that I have a little more safety though... ya know, that *would* be sick. $5/month spread over 1000 people makes a huge difference in our stability.

givebutter.com/SupportSAS25

Correct. What comes for Harvard will come to others. There is not enough space nor $ to absorb students, postdocs, faculty, & labs. What happens when the administration attacks its next target? Protecting the project of American science & its benefits requires individual and collective action - now.

Trump team pauses new student visa interviews as it weighs expanding social media vetting It’s the latest salvo against universities, many of whom rely heavily on foreign students for funds.

The Republican administration has halted all student (and postdoc etc) VISA interviews.

I've written a lot about soft power here. The attacks on foreign students in the US not only undercuts the funding stream for US universities; they hemorrhage US soft power.

This is what is at stake:

FIRST DAY IN THE LAB WOOOOO

GOOD NEWS! Moderna’s combination COVID/influenza vaccine candidate mRNA-1083 has OUTPERFORMED the current standalone vaccines for BOTH viruses in a large (8000+) Phase III trial. A combination vaccine would make it easier for people to get vaccinated against COVID and influenza at the same time. 🧪🧵⬇️

We are seeing multiple instances of reviewers doing manuscript reviews via use of AI/LLM.

If you don't want to do a review the old-fashioned way, better to decline the request.

Giving someone else's manuscript to AI is a violation of intellectual property rights/laws; the manuscript isn't yours...

Remember my request yesterday for NIH funded folks (or intramural) to share the impact of their research! Here’s a site for you to do that!!!!

Force people into a rat race for security instead, and they'll do everything they can to get and stay ahead. They'll cut corners. They'll take shortcuts. And, yes, they'll readily have a computer do all of their thinking for them.

Now inequality is actually getting worse and we're also turning kids' brains into mush because we've devalued everything but getting them into jobs. ChatGPT comes along and makes it easy for you to half-ass even directly employable skills.

If a degree is just a piece of paper you need to get a desirable, good-paying job, someone invents a machine that can do it for you, and the notion that you might go to college to develop your mind for its own, non-remunerative sake is a punch line and an elite privilege, why not use the machine?

Sarah, a freshman at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, said she first used ChatGPT to cheat during the spring semester of her final year of high school. (Sarah’s name, like those of other current students in this article, has been changed for privacy.) After getting acquainted with the chatbot, Sarah used it for all her classes: Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries. “My grades were amazing,” she said. “It changed my life.” Sarah continued to use AI when she started college this past fall. Why wouldn’t she? Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit, where she writes under the username maybeimnotsmart. “I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.”

Teachers have tried AI-proofing assignments, returning to Blue Books or switching to oral exams. Brian Patrick Green, a tech-ethics scholar at Santa Clara University, immediately stopped assigning essays after he tried ChatGPT for the first time. Less than three months later, teaching a course called Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, he figured a low-stakes reading reflection would be safe — surely no one would dare use ChatGPT to write something personal. But one of his students turned in a reflection with robotic language and awkward phrasing that Green knew was AI-generated. A philosophy professor across the country at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.” Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot. Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.”

Once the chatbot had outlined Wendy’s essay, providing her with a list of topic sentences and bullet points of ideas, all she had to do was fill it in. Wendy delivered a tidy five-page paper at an acceptably tardy 10:17 a.m. When I asked her how she did on the assignment, she said she got a good grade. “I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

Don't have anything new to say about AI here. One thing I will say is that higher ed has long been broken. If elites had spent more time thinking through the point of education and how well we really do it than stoking woke panic, maybe we wouldn't be staring at this abyss. nymag.com/intelligence...

This has been my dream since I was 20 and sitting in my developmental biology class at Iowa State reading her papers on convergent extension, absolutely floored I'm in a space like this 7 years later. So excited to start my projects and grow under someone so inspiring.

Hi I'm Les and I'm the newest member of the Lila Solnica-Krezel Lab 🥹

Exclusive: NIH to end billions of dollars in foreign research grants Move by US biomedical agency jeopardizes thousands of projects on infectious diseases, cancer and more.

These are not good news for us foreigners who are (or plan to be) co-PI an NIH grants @altnih4science.bsky.social. Anybody who knows whether they plan to terminate ongoing R01 grants?

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"NIH will not retroactively revise ongoing awards to remove foreign subawards at this time."

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