Warmflash lab

As stressful as it is to run a laboratory in the US right now, my thoughts are often with the NIH staff living in the awful chaos trying to preserve the whole enterprise. I’m grateful for every moment they choose not to give up. These people are the only thing keeping it from entirely collapsing.

Juxtaposition of human pluripotent stem cells with amnion-like cells is sufficient to trigger primitive streak formation Studies in the mouse have established that communication between the trophectoderm and the epiblast is crucial for initiating gastrulation. In the primate embryo, the amnion rather than the trophectod...

Happy to share our latest preprint. We show that juxtaposing amnion cells with human pluripotent cells is enough to trigger gastrulation-like events. Great work by former student Xiangyu Kong now a postdoc in the Theunissen lab @washumedicine.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The "Big Beautiful Bill" isn’t the federal budget—it’s a reconciliation bill focused on tax cuts. The real FY26 funding decisions for NIH, NSF, and more are happening now in Congress.

www.ascb.org/science-poli...

Iowa: Sen. Ernst Maine: Sen. Collins Missouri: Sen. Hawley North Carolina: Sen. Tillis Ohio: Sen. Husted Utah: Sen. Curtis West Virginia: Sen. Capito

If one of these people is your senator, it is incredibly important that you call them today.

Urge them to vote NO on the Senate budget bill that would make most Americans poorer to give billionaires a tax cut they don't even need.

We're tired of the false information and wrote this letter to the NIH director Jay Bhattacharya. FACT: clinical trials have been halted. With real ethical impacts. Is this what Americans want to be known for? Let's see what the director says.

Today, my NIH colleagues and I did something scary but really important. We spoke up about egregious harms we are seeing happen to research participants and public health through thoughtless and politicized policies at NIH. 🧵1/3

apnews.com/article/nih-...

Shattered Science: The Research Lost as Trump Targets NIH Funding The Trump administration cut research funding that sought cures for future pandemics, examined the causes of dementia and tried to prevent HIV transmission. More than 150 researchers shared with…

NEW: The Trump administration cut research funding that sought cures for future pandemics, examined the causes of dementia and tried to prevent HIV transmission.

ProPublica heard from more than 150 researchers to understand the work that’s been lost.

A novel self-organizing embryonic stem cell system reveals the role of Wnt signaling parameters in anterior-posterior patterning of the nervous system A Wnt activity gradient is essential for the formation of the anterior-posterior (AP) axis in all vertebrates. The relationship between the dynamics of Wnt signaling and specification of AP coordinate...

Happy to share our latest on a system to study anterior-posterior patterning of the nervous system. We show Wnt signaling pattern is not a simple low to high gradient and timing of activation is crucial to setting the pattern. From outstanding grad student Siqi Du.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A Path Forward to Save American Bio-Medical Research Over the past four months I’ve spoken to dozens of biomedical researchers...

A Path Forward to Save American Bio-Medical Research talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-pat...

Extended culture of 2D gastruloids to model human mesoderm development - Nature Methods This study reports an extended 2D gastruloid system for spatially modeling human mesoderm development.

Our work on mesoderm development in 2D gastruloids is now published in nature methods

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

Why Do They Have It In For Biomedical Research? Here is a brief follow-up on the question TPM Reader MA addresses...

Many people are asking - what on earth is the point of killing biomedical research? Read this from @joshtpm.bsky.social who has covered this very well. Admin is using funding to exert control over universities, they don't care about resulting damage to science. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-d...

the word alert is in a purple circle ALT: the word alert is in a purple circle

ACTION ITEM-----ACTION ITEM

Implementation of Schedule F

This is what a lot of us have been worried about.

This allows for many civil service positions to replaced with political appointees. This could include NIH institute directors and even POs.

BUT THERE IS A COMMENT PERIOD...

1/n

A letter to Republican Senators from concerned federal workers at NIH.

I received this letter, sent to 11 Republican members of Congress this weekend from anonymous NIHers.

1/n
.

As someone directly affected by this, let me be clear:

I'd rather lose my job because Harvard chose to fight than keep my job and see a generation of white supremacists parade its corpse around like a war trophy.

This is a big deal. Spread the word. But it’s tiny compared to the totality of what’s happening at NIH. Cure Research for all cancers, Alzheimer’s, everything is being gutted. Intentionally. It’s all getting burned to the ground but the news isn’t getting out. The new cures won’t be there for you.

From a source at NIH:

“Right now NIH’s ability to buy things is dead. Nearly all people with the power to make an order — purchasing people — have been removed.
The NIH hospital can’t buy medicines, the labs can’t buy petri dishes. X-Ray machine breaks? Too bad.
Everything is stopped”

It’s stunning to me that the New York Times did not put the story on the bloodbath at the NIH, CDC, and FDA on its front page this morning.

Graph from the Washington Post showing declines in spending at NIH. New grants cut from 1 billion to around 400 million. Overall grants down from 4.5 billion to 2.4 billion.

Trump has cut the NIH budget by more than half in defiance of Congressionally mandated appropriations for the agency. No comparison historically, not even the Great Recession. This is clearly not legal and Congress needs to address it.

The NIH firing plan is really a radical institute merger and an authoritarian takeover this is an Orbanization of US science: a move to exert political control over discovery, which will kill the US medical research industry and end cancer cures. The plan must be stopped. We can act.

"The consolidation/RIF plan pulls power away from scientists and puts it in the hands of political employees. It sets up Trump and Musk to kill NIH as an evidence-based science funder. We must stop this plan."

New contributed post on our blog: Please read.
It describes Orban and authoritarianism. 🧪

Just before bedtime last night I got a message from inside NIH which read:

“It’s so, so bad and no one cares (who has any influence)”

I asked “What, in particular?”

My friend responded “Everything”

Crowd at Lincoln memorial

The @standupforscience.bsky.social DC rally is on.

What we are hearing from around the country:
"this is big!"
"biggest rally I have seen around here in years and years"

The public cares about medical research--and students, GenZ, and other people too are ready to stand up.

Image of crowd at Rice Stand up for Science event

Good crowd to #StandUpForScience on Rice campus. Some powerful speeches from trainees about having opportunities suddenly taken from them and the personal impacts of the administration's targeting of minorities. Very real damage has already been done.

Richest guy in the world telling us we can’t afford to have our government fund cancer research.

Zachary Cohn on LinkedIn: In 2015, I became a federal employee at 18F, an office inside of the… In 2015, I became a federal employee at 18F, an office inside of the General Services Administration. It was the hardest, and best, job of my life. While…

A story from one of the fired 18F employees:

www.linkedin.com/posts/zachar...

We talk about Bezos, or Citi, or Big Tech, but cancer's brand is seriously in the toilet. Everyone hates it. And yet, day one hit from Trump/Musk was to shut down all federal funding for cancer cure research. And it's still mostly shut down. Have you ever known anyone with cancer?

Inside the Collapse at NIH Administration officials pressured NIH to avoid clear advice from the agency’s own lawyers to restart grant funding now.

I talked to NIH officials, current and former, about what's been happening inside the agency since the Trump administration shut down their grantmaking pipeline in January. Their stories showed just how willing our new leaders are to break the law: www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

This is horrifying and should be read by anyone who thinks we can just wait and things at NIH will go back to normal. NIH leadership currently breaking the law in defiance of judges orders and their own lawyers' advice. Cranks like Memoli and Bhattacharya are only going to make the situation worse.

This is what you call robbing the future.

Photo of the United States with a color code for states that have rallies confirmed, in progress, needing a leader, or no leader.

🚨 WANT TO HELP US STAND UP FOR SCIENCE? 🚨

Here's a little update on where we're currently at with the planning process!

Is your state red or grey & you want to see an event happen? Fill out our volunteer form or share with a friend! airtable.com/app4h5wUssMG...

#standupforscience2025