Les Sutton

My cohort is trying to do Grillz for our defenses where we all get grillz to celebrate becoming doctors and I think this is the best idea I've heard in ages

Sitting here with friends, scheming to bring more beautiful things into the world.

I open bluesky, am met with more horror. Every day more horror.

On Sunday, I gave a talk to the scientists where I implored everyone to do *anything*.

It's easier to break than make things. Please make something.

Passed my qual yesterday :) 🐟

I love grading students homeworks because I just have fun talking to myself in the comments. Highlighting the good text and commenting "slay," or "bars" throughout their assignment makes me giggle, hope my kiddos enjoy it too

Every time I need to reconnect I watch Cave of Forgotten Dreams from Werner Herzog for this reason exactly

Site-directed mutagenesis I miss you

Pros of switching into a new model for study: learn new tools! Ask different questions! Become flexible in your thinking!
Cons: favorite techniques don't work anymore

Anyway, women, people of color, people on the spectrum or with disabilities, and queer people all deserve to be in science and the old guard that says otherwise is literally decomposing.

Reminder that the first time Watson mentioned Rosalind in The Double Helix, his comment was that she was ugly and would look nicer if she put more effort into her appearance. Imagine ripping someone's idea, it putting you on the map, and the way you immortalize her is by calling her ugly.

DNA scientist James Watson has a remarkably long history of sexist, racist public comments “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty,” he said in 2003. “I think it would be great.”

Hey folks, as news of Watson's demise spreads, please don't set aside his weighty legacy of misogyny and racism. He was truly among the worst of us. www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18...

My students keep finding out how old I am and saying I've reached unc status :(

Lila came back highly impressed at your sheer number of lines you've generated, btw. Highlighted your talk when summarizing her fav finds from the conference :)

Aiming to fill the gap in PCP-focused research at the next Gastrulation Reloaded 💪🏻💪🏻

a cartoon character is smiling with the words oh yeah it 's all coming together below him Alt: Cronk from Emperor's New Groove is smiling with the words oh yeah it 's all coming together below him

AND my collaborator shipped the plasmids I've been waiting on!

Little win since I need maternal-zygotics and will have to do a few more generations of breeding, but woo! Closer to samples!

Win of the day: inherited 7 alleles in this line of fish for my project that were abandoned for a year before I picked it up. After 6 months, I'm happy to report I finally have tanks of each allele via either an in or outcross that were produced in 2025 and I didn't lose a single one 🎉🎉

just called a hazardous chemical a "no-no substance" when explaining to my undergrad the hazardous chemical bins

Study finds mRNA coronavirus vaccines prolonged life of cancer patients A study found that covid-19 vaccines appeared to awaken the immune system in lung and skin cancer patients, helping them live longer than those not vaccinated.

Not fake news. Some serious side effects of COVID mRNA vaccines seem to have been discovered! (Seriously positive side effects.)
🧪
www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

Dawkins is awful in so so many ways, including his vicious and vile transphobia. I think people forget what a gross hack he is sometimes.

I did a deep dive into his various bigotries not too long ago
youtu.be/-XudqTNCqr8?...

Taught the undergrads in the class I'm TAing about the Zotero word plug-in and how easy it is to have citations managed for you with a citation manager, they have been SO geeked. Anyway this is me singing my love for the Zotero Word plugin

i'm glad the data centers dumping pollution into poor and minority neighborhoods allow you to do your lit searches marginally faster so you still have enough time to post endlessly on social media about how productive you are

it's a real game changer, incorporating LLMs into your workflow, so it is

This.

Automatically generated "reviews" are for sure useful to learn about a new field.

But as scientific *contribution*, automated reviews merely aggregate information without synthesis.

An illusion of progress or productivity.

Penn rejects White House proposal for special funding treatment With the decision, Penn becomes the third university to decline the offer.

🚨🚨🚨

And THREE stood up!

Penn has joined MIT & Brown in rejecting Trump’s loyalty oath compact.

When we join together and fight back, WE WIN!

No amount of federal bribery is worth surrendering the freedom to question, explore, and dissent.

LET’S GO!

#DefendHigherEd
@aaup-penn.bsky.social

just gotta say that as a faculty member trying to teach students basic CLI and coding skills for scientific analyses, this forced pivot to interacting with your computer as the default is going to make it SO MUCH HARDER to teach basic computer skills

Shout out to my cohort, my favorite people ever

"so in conclusion.... Yay!" Is the best way I think I've ever heard someone summarize a figure during a journal club

Black + Decker wine refrigerator set to 65F for squid housing, appropriately titled The Squincubator 2.0

Groves lab wins best incubator for Squid housing with The Squincubator

While it is easy to focus on the apparent lack of moral courage shown by the scientific establishment, I am more struck by two other aspects of these reactions. The first is the lack of utilization of scholarship to guide their reactions. There is a substantial body of scholarly literature about the value of participation of individuals from diverse groups in science, particularly health-related research. Moreover, many universities have scholars, including historians, sociologists, and lawyers, who have devoted their efforts to studying the consolidation of power by authoritarian governments. What is happening in America is not new. It has occurred, with variations, in many other countries. Since individuals and groups involved with science should be well equipped to explore and understand scholarly writings, I expected more efforts to use this information to shape and articulate their responses.

9/14

In communicating with some of the scientists affected by grant terminations, it was striking (but not surprising) that many felt abandoned by their institutions and the scientific establishment at large. This was fueled, in part, by the contrast between this acquiescence and the rapid institutional responses, including lawsuits, after the administration had proposed a cap on the rate of reimbursement for so-called indirect costs of research. The scientific establishment had the capacity to push back vigorously when some of their values (financial viability) were threatened but could not seem to muster much energy when other principles were under assault.

6/14

The programs had very broad eligibility criteria that included being a member of a racial or ethnic group that was historically underrepresented in research, but eligibility also included those from disadvantaged educational or socioeconomic backgrounds and those with a physical disability or other factors, or just an interest in working on the biomedical workforce. These grants were not awarded through illegal, “racial preference” programs, but rather through highly competitive, merit-based processes. But rather than articulating and defending these goals and processes, many parts of the scientific establishment seemed to be rushing to violate one of the first tenets of historian Timothy Snyder’s important book On Tyranny: Do not obey in advance.

5/14