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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦

@merz.bsky.social

4.8K followers 3.3K following 15K posts

"There are no answers; only choices." – S. Lem I choose one [o] or two-cell [8] organisms and dissonant music. Professor of Biochemistry @ UW-Seattle. Any coincidence of my opinions with my employer's is coincidental.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 12d

Josef Koudelka, Prague, 1968

Resistance fighter on top of Russian tank

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Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦

Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 13h

Republicans feel empowered by their leader's autocratic coup against the Constitution to pursue their most cartoonishly evil agenda items, like literally making it easier to kill seals and whales

abcnews.go.com/Politics/wir...

Republicans try to weaken 50-year-old law protecting whales, seals and polar bears

One of the U.S.’s longest standing pieces of environmental legislation, credited with helping save rare whales from extinction, is the subject of an effort for cutbacks from Republican lawmakers who now feel they have the political will to do so

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 3h

Rest up. There will be time to engage later.

Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 3h

Germany is not pulling out of the WHO. Germany is not ending infectious disease surveillance, or shutting down random cancer clinical trials at random. It is not shutting down graduate and postdoctoral scientific training programs, wholesale.

Etc., etc.

Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 3h

What's happening in Germany is not remotely similar to what's being done to science and medicine in the US. The comparison is facially absurd.

Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦

derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 6h

About a month ago, the Trump administration got rid of the de minimis exemption, whereby packages valued under $800 could slide in without import duties. Now there's a backlog as the government can't process all of this paperwork, leading to UPS just destroying packages

Business Insider headline reads: UPS is telling customers that their packages coming to the US are marked for destruction.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 9h

His mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries.
#persecution

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 9h

His mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries.
#persecution

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 10h

Are we supposed to know who that guy is or is he just some random shitheel?

Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 10h

Absolutely no one gets out of here alive. Live well.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 13h

He can’t cheat death. No one can.

Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 15h

Without NIH not gonna happen. To be fair, with NIH also not gonna happen.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 15h

It's the best there is.

Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 17h

I remind you that you replied to me, not the reverse.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 17h

No, I really, really have not. I have been an NIH-funded researcher for 20 years, longer if I count my PhD and postdoc.

Destroy the US biomedical research enterprise and you set biomedical research worldwide back by decades. There is no substitute.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 18h

People really have no idea, the extent to which the US has led the global biomedical research enterprise.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 18h

We are, by a huge margin, the most important.

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Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 18h

a russ vought special

Sara Partridge, Ph.D. @sarapartridge.bsky.social · 18h

There are reports that the *entire* office of special education at the US Dept of Education has been cut. These hardworking folks ensure kids with disabilities get equal access to a quality education.

America’s children deserve better than this.

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Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦

Anna Gifty @itsafronomics.bsky.social · 20h

lol gentle reminder that DEI is not illegal. Supporting marginalized groups is not illegal. Anyone reneging on support is making a CHOICE to do so.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 19h

You need to understand: this administration is not merely destroying access to treatments, but the possibility that they might exist at all.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 19h

Reminder: Thiessen started out working for Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. Many have left the Post or been fired. Thiessen is still there.

James Fallows @jfallows.bsky.social · 2d

A columnist still at WaPo.

Headline: "Yes, Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize."

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Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦

Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 20h

One week from now I plan to be out marching against the idiotic criminals running our government. I'm not "getting paid" and I'm not part of any "Pro-Hamas" group. I'm just mad as hell.

I will not be punching any police officers, nor setting fires, nor breaking any glass. Why will I turn out? (1/2)

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Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦

Canadian Cycling Magazine @canadiancycling.bsky.social · 20h

Simply incredible.

cyclingmagazine.ca/sections/new...

With fifth straight Il Lombardia title, Pogačar tallies tenth Monument win - Canadian Cycling Magazine

Once more Evenepoel comes runner-up to the world champion

cyclingmagazine.ca

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Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 20h

an incontestable fact of the second trump administration is it is actively trying to sicken and kill as many americans as it can

Lena Sun @lenasun.bsky.social · 22h

NEW: @CDCgov hit hard by massive firings that several staff describe to me as a “bloodbath.”
Among those RIFd:
—leadership of the center for immunization and respiratory diseases;
—leadership of global health center
—leadership of the measles outbreak response; 1/4

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 19h

He cannot get treatments that do not exist because he has destroyed the capacity to invent them. He cannot run from pandemics that are not surveilled.

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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 19h

This is not better or worse but it is very different.

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