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Reposted by Mike White

Jennifer Ouellette @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · Apr 30

RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory. arstechnica.com/health/2025/...

RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory

In his 2021 book vilifying Anthony Fauci, RFK Jr. lays out support for an alternate theory.

arstechnica.com

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Scott Gottlieb, MD @scottgottliebmd.bsky.social · Apr 28

Whooping cough cases are rising, and doctors are bracing for another tough year. There have been 8,485 cases reported so far in 2025, according to preliminary data from the CDC. That’s twice as many cases as this time last year.

apnews.com/article/whoo...

Whooping cough cases are rising again in the US

Preliminary data from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says the U.S. has seen 8,485 cases of whooping cough in 2025.

apnews.com

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · Apr 28

Final point here: this post is from an anonymous NIH employee, and it feels critical to raise these voices precisely because the Trump administration has silenced credible NIH officials and their leadership is not representing them.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

It’s a mess inside NIH right now, and the staff needs public support and help. The top of NIH has been lopped off, with almost all senior leadership, from former acting director Larry Tabak to head of HR Julie Berko, removed via forced retirements or RIFs. Thousands of staff, from grants program officials to fellows to scientists, have been removed via possibly illegal means, and are not working.

Morale is uneven. In a personal conversation earlier this week, one senior employee said to me “NIH is dead right now. Unless things change dramatically soon, NIH is finished as a funder of high-quality science.” Scientists go through a lot of rejection in a career, and so they are resilient. Thanks to that resilience, some NIH’ers are keeping hold of the mission of supporting US science, staying positive, and rolling with the punches. But there are widespread fears the agency is in a state of collapse.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · Apr 28

What can you do? Make noise.
The ask is “Leave NIH funding at last year’s (FY24) level. No DOGE cuts. No recission to codify cuts. Hands off NIH.”
If they are going to vote to cut cancer research, lets make that clear.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

Public outreach: Get word to the public about how Musk and Trump are blocking NIH from funding important cures for disease. Tell the public what Republicans are planning. Talk about how rescission or reconciliation can write into law the cuts that Musk and Trump have created using underhanded and illegal means. Consider recording a short video for social media. Some groups can help you do this, groups like Science Homecoming, and InvestNScience.

Congressional outreach: Yes, even if you have only Democratic Congressional representation it is still important to reach out to them.

Call, visit, and pressure your Democratic Senators to use their procedural tools, like objecting to unanimous consent, to stop Senate business until the NIH interference — the cancer cure interference — is stopped. Democrats can and should do far more. Sen. Cory Booker’s one-day speech drove attention; Sen. Chris van Hollen’s trip to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia did too. More Senate Democrats should be doing things that are not business as usual. The same holds true for House Democrats: they can be doing more and you can read this playbook to them.

Pressure your Republican Senators and Representatives. Probably the best way to create pressure is to go to the media: go to a townhall and ask a question that gets out to TikTok or YouTube. Or write to your local paper. Visit them and their staffers too, and push them to act.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · Apr 28

New at Can We Still Govern: An anonymous NIH employee maps out the GOP budget gameplan to permanently gut our most important science agency.
Impoundment, delay and red tape will create artificial "savings" that become the new benchmark for NIH budgets.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

The NIH budget is on a fast track to disaster

An NIH insider explains what Republicans are likely to do next, and what we can do

donmoynihan.substack.com

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 25

What if the reference human genome had been paywalled? Yesterday I heard genomics pioneer Bob Waterston tell of a Perkin-Elmer CEO who envisioned a pay-for-access genome that would have smothered the incredible recent progress in biotechnology.

www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/what-if-th...

What if the Human Genome Project was paywalled?

In 1999 a Perkins-Elmer CEO envisioned a pay-for-access genome scheme that would have smothered two decades innovation in biotechnology and genomic medicine.

www.thisgenomiclife.org

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 23

Do you have suggestions for how to write effective comments to proposed rules?

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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · Apr 23

The notice and COMMENT PERIOD OPENED TODAY AND CLOSES MAY 23.

Anyone who would like to register an objection or comment should go to this page and click on the green “public comment” button at the top:

www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

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Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is proposing a rule to increase career employee accountability. Agency supervisors report great difficulty removing employees for poor performance or misconduc...

www.federalregister.gov

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 21

In Missouri legislators introduced a bill that would require any meat from livestock treated with mRNA vaccines to be labeled as a "gene therapy product." Fortunately the bill died.

www.riverfronttimes.com/news/critics...

Critics of Missouri's Anti-Vax Food Labeling Bill Say They Were Harassed

The bill died in committee, but some say the bill's supporters issued death threats

www.riverfronttimes.com

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · Apr 20

Again, cancelling NSF & other federal competitive grants in higher education is massive contract breaking which undermines the most basic tenets of the rule of law & property rights in a democratic society.

Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · Apr 18

👇🎯

They. Are. Breaking. Signed. Contracts. For. No. Legal. Reason.

You want to pass legislation not funding this stuff going forward? Fine. Epically idiotic, but legal.

This is something else. Shredding the basic foundations of the rule of law. Textbook authoritarianism.

Maya Sen @mayasen.bsky.social · Apr 18

Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants

the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever

they aren’t going into universities’ endowments

they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research

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David van Dijk @vandijklab.bsky.social · Apr 18

What if LLMs could “read” & “write” biology? 🤔
Introducing C2S‑Scale—a Yale and Google collab: we scaled LLMs (up to 27B!) to analyze & generate single‑cell data 🧬 ➡️ 📝
🔗 Blog: research.google/blog/teachin...
🔗 Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Teaching machines the language of biology: Scaling large language models for next-generation single-cell analysis

research.google

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 18

The image seems to suggest Trump leaked from a lab

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Anshul Kundaje @anshulkundaje.bsky.social · Apr 18

ai.stanford.edu/postdoctoral...

Postdoc candidates with strong expertise in AI for bio should apply for this new Stanford SAIL fellowship. We encourage applicants who would like to work with multiple SAIL faculty (we are part of SAIL as well). Come join us

SAIL Postdoctoral Fellows – Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

ai.stanford.edu

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 16

How completely lacking in patriotism do you need to be to write that dek?

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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · Apr 16

A disturbing, but alas, not surprising, report from the Washington Post.

[Gift link]

wapo.st/4jtCPdw

Women, minorities fired in purge of NIH science review boards

Scientists, with expertise in fields that include mental health, cancer and infectious disease, typically serve five-year terms and were not given a reason for their dismissal.

wapo.st

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Nicky Whiffin @nickywhiffin.bsky.social · Apr 11

🚨I could not be more excited to share our new preprint on saturation genome editing of the small nuclear RNA (snRNA) RNU4-2:
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

A super fun collaboration with incredible duo @gregfindlay.bsky.social @joachimdejonghe.bsky.social from @crick.ac.uk
🧬🖥️🩺

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Saturation genome editing of RNU4-2 reveals distinct dominant and recessive neurodevelopmental disorders

Recently, de novo variants in an 18 nucleotide region in the centre of RNU4-2 were shown to cause ReNU syndrome, a syndromic neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) that is predicted to affect tens of thous...

www.medrxiv.org

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 15

I am looking forward to spending the next year learning about 1st millennium Arabic and Islamic literature:

Literature and History Podcast @lahpodcast.bsky.social · Apr 15

New podcast episode from Literature and History on Pre-Islamic Arabia available now! literatureandhistory.com/episode-111-...

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 15

And prosecute those who broke the law.

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 15

Drosophila biologists still going strong with the best gene names in the business:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40215271/

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 15

Interesting to read the above side-by-side with Google's new AGI safety paper:

blog.google/technology/g...

Read Google DeepMind’s new paper on responsible artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Artificial general intelligence (AGI), AI that’s at least as capable as humans at most cognitive tasks, could be here within the coming years. It has the power to transf…

blog.google

Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 15

Here's an interesting thought-instead of speculating about super-intelligent AGI, let's think about the implications of artificial intelligence as *normal* tech.

New essay from the authors of AI Snake Oil:

knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...

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Akshat Rathi @akshatrathi.bsky.social · Apr 15

A very smart take on what "smarter than human AI" really means, from the inimitable @glichfield.bsky.social

"Stop trying to compare AI to humans, or to anything from the movies, and instead just keep asking: What does it actually do?" www.bloomberg.com/opinion/feat...

When Will AI Be Smarter Than Humans? Don’t Ask

The term “artificial general intelligence” is being bandied about by some of tech’s smartest people, but nobody knows what it really means.

www.bloomberg.com

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 13

Nobody starting a career in STEM in 2025 should skip learning about AI. Take a formal class if you can, but anyone can reinvent themselves to work with AI intelligently. I have some suggestions for how to teach yourself, even if your math is limited:

www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/how-to-tea...

How to teach yourself about AI

www.thisgenomiclife.org

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 13

I tell my kids they'll need to reinvent themselves during their careers. In grad school I hadn't written code since high school and worked in a lab with only two computers. A few of us taught ourselves Perl because it seemed useful and now 40% of my work is computational.

And now it's AI:

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Mike White @genologos.bsky.social · Apr 11

A 2024 open access review of recent progress towards ASO treatment of cancer. The real challenge is figuring out how to deliver RNA or DNA to the proper tissue. The challenge is being met.

doi.org/10.1016/j.om...

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