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Reposted by Jim Mansfield

Kathleen Clark @kathleenclark.bsky.social · 1d

A master class from MIT in responding to authoritarian overreach:

Your “premise … is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
… America’s leadership in science & innovation depends on independent thinking & open competition for excellence.

Dear Madam Secretary,
I write in response to your letter of October 1, inviting MIT to review a "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." I acknowledge the vital importance of these matters.
I appreciated the chance to meet with you earlier this year to discuss the priorities we share for American higher education.
As we discussed, the Institute's mission of service to the nation directs us to advance knowledge, educate students and bring knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges.
We do that in line with a clear set of values, with excellence above all. Some practical examples:
• MIT prides itself on rewarding merit. Students, faculty and staff succeed here based on the strength of their talent, ideas and hard work. For instance, the Institute was the first to reinstate the SAT/ACT requirement after the pandemic. And MIT has never had legacy preferences in admissions.
• MIT opens its doors to the most talented students regardless of their family's finances. Admissions are need-blind. Incoming undergraduates whose families earn less than $200,000 a year pay no tuition. Nearly 88% of our last graduating class left MIT with no debt for their education. We make a wealth of free courses and low-cost certificates available to any American with an internet connection. Of the undergraduate degrees we award, 94% are in STEM fields. And in service to the nation, we cap enrollment of international undergraduates at roughly 10%.

source:
https://orgchart.mit.edu/letters/regarding-compact

• We value free expression, as clearly described in the MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom. We must hear facts and opinions we don't like - and engage respectfully with those with whom we disagree.
These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they're right, and we live by them because they support our mission - work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law.
The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
In our view, America's leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.
As you know, MIT's record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America's research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.
Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth

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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 1d

Every targeted institution (my own very much included) should cut and paste this letter onto their letterhead.

Kathleen Clark @kathleenclark.bsky.social · 1d

A master class from MIT in responding to authoritarian overreach:

Your “premise … is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
… America’s leadership in science & innovation depends on independent thinking & open competition for excellence.

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Reposted by Jim Mansfield

Anne Carpenter @drannecarpenter.bsky.social · 22h

15 years in the making, we confirmed that mitochondria - the powerhouse of the cell - have an unusual localization in patients who experience psychosis (including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders). You’ll never guess what kind of patient cells we used to make this discovery… 🧵

mitochondria from bipolar patients are closer to the nucleus in these images; control patients' are spread out further

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Micha Sam Brickman Raredon @msbr89.bsky.social · 3d

🔥Sequencing-free whole-genome spatial transcriptomics at single-molecule resolution

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Sequencing-free whole-genome spatial transcriptomics at single-molecule resolution

RAEFISH delivers whole-transcriptome (>20,000 genes) imaging at single-molecule resolution in cells and tissues and enables direct gRNA detection for high-content, image-based CRISPR screens.

www.cell.com

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Jim Mansfield @jrmansfield.bsky.social · 5d

Or both at the same time!

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Reposted by Jim Mansfield

Defend Democracy @defenddemocracy.bsky.social · 7d

President Macron: “Europeans, let's wake up!

We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks.”

defenddemocracy.eu/macron-democ...

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NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 5d

Liberals say that recent Supreme Court ruling have given the executive branch too much power. But they’re wrong, because the rulings only apply to Trump and will all be reversed when there’s a Democratic president.

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Denis Wirtz @deniswirtz.bsky.social · 7d

Johns Hopkins sophomore student Florin Selaru develops a new scheme to deconvolve colors in histological sections for digital pathology.

It greatly outperforms traditional linear color deconvolution.

Congrats Florin!

Read his paper here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Gautam Dey @gautamdey.bsky.social · 7d

If you’re applying to your dream lab for an internship/PhD/postdoc, always send a second email 1-2 weeks after the first one if you don’t hear back.

I promise we will be grateful rather than annoyed. My email inbox is a disaster and I’m quite junior - and very few of us have secretarial support

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Dave Vanness @djvanness.bsky.social · 11d

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

Nick Fleisher @nickfleisher.bsky.social · 11d

30% drop year over year!

Amid visa restrictions, international freshmen enrollment plummets at UW-Madison

This year’s number of international freshmen is the lowest recorded since at least 2015.

www.jsonline.com

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Albert Vilella, PhD. @albertvilella.bsky.social · 13d

Justin hodges, not on bluesky, on PhDs

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NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 13d

Has America become so soft and woke that we can't appreciate why all of our top generals need to leave their posts and fly to Virginia to be lectured by the Fox News weekend host about the warrior mentality?

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Sophie Acton @actonlab.bsky.social · 29d

Pleased to update this - The paper is published in Cell Reports!
A long road for this one, the paper grew exponentially and evolved over a couple of years. Thanks to @makris1.bsky.social for sticking with it to untangle all the new data!

@cp-cellreports.bsky.social
www.cell.com/cell-reports...

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Matthew Dowd @matthewjdowd.bsky.social · 15d

Quinnipiac in recent poll asked: Do you think that the way people talk about politics these days is contributing to violence in the United States, or don't you think so? 82% of voters agreed with this including majority of Dems, Independents, and GOP. I said basically this and got fired.

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Jim Mansfield @jrmansfield.bsky.social · 15d

"our analysis indicates that substantial NIH budget cuts—including those implemented at the funding margin—could curtail research linked to a large share of potential drug approvals."

Wafik S. El-Deiry, MD, PhD, FACP @weldeiry.bsky.social · 15d

What if NIH had been 40% smaller?

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What if NIH had been 40% smaller?

Replaying history with less NIH funding shows widespread impacts on drug-linked research

www.science.org

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Jim Mansfield @jrmansfield.bsky.social · 18d

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Jim Mansfield @jrmansfield.bsky.social · 18d

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Ryan Marino, MD @ryanmarino.bsky.social · 18d

The word “autism” was first used to describe behavioral differences in children in 1911 but autism has been documented using available records going back to the 1700s (definitively) and further.

Acetaminophen (Tylenol, paracetamol) was discovered in 1878 and first sold in the United States in 1950.

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Jaweed Kaleem @jaweedkaleem.bsky.social · 18d

BREAKING: A federal judge has ordered Trump to restore $500 million in frozen UCLA NIH grants. The same judge, Rita F. Lin, previously ordered all UCLA NSF grants reinstated. Lin has now nearly entirely reversed Trump's July de-funding of UCLA research: www.latimes.com/california/s...

Federal judge orders Trump to restore $500 million in frozen UCLA medical research grants

A San Francisco-based federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to restore all National Institutes of Health grants to UCLA, roughly $500 million, that the government suspended in July.

www.latimes.com

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Evan Sutton @evansutton.bsky.social · 22d

Pour one out for the @nytpitchbot.bsky.social. Satire is dead in a world where the real "reporting" looks like this

Screenshot from the cowardly clowns at the nyt. Headline and sub read

Trump Administration Wields Its Full Toolbox to Bring Media to Heel

ABC’s decision to “indefinitely” suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show illuminates the administration’s efficacy so far.

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NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 22d

Controversial change

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bioRxiv Bioinfo @biorxiv-bioinfo.bsky.social · 23d

SpatialFuser: A Unified Deep Learning Framework for Spatial Multi-Omics Data Integrative Analysis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.14.676067v1

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Vizgen @vizgen.bsky.social · 23d

Next-gen spatial transcriptomic tools are helping overcome the challenge of degraded & FFPE samples.

Vizgen co-founder Jiang He explains how these advances are opening new doors for research in oncology, neuroscience & beyond:
www.biocompare.com/Editorial-Ar...

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Reposted by Jim Mansfield

Nik Fortelny @nikfortelny.bsky.social · 22d

Postdoc position open!
Digital Pathology: Therapy-response prediction using spatial biology
University of Salzburg
Deadline: October 26th, 2025

We look forward to hearing from you!

www.plus.ac.at/biowissensch...

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Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 27d

This, too

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