Sure seems to be a lot of business jets crashing this year.

This week feels like living in a bizarro world: Losing money is celebrated; profitability questioned. Ignorance is trusted; knowledge dismissed. Criminals are defended; victims attacked. Cowards attract followers; the courageous are shunned.

PSA: get your flu shot now if you haven't already Using last year's flu trends as a template, from today we expect infection rates to double every 1.5 weeks, peaking ~2 months from now. After vax, immunity takes 1.5 weeks to kick in, peaks at 1-2 months, decays after 3 months.

The study suggests young researchers make more disruptive discoveries, and older ones fewer but more lasting ones. Perhaps experience, time, and awareness of long-term bottlenecks might be advantages for older researchers to make the more difficult and lasting breakthroughs.

Wherein a couple of tech bros get excited that Claude can propose exactly the same things that researchers did a few years ago

This is the clearest behind-the-scenes exposé of Theranos I've heard. TylerShultz is my hero, and a funny guy too. Per Tyler, every scientist there knew that not only did the technology and tests not work, but there was no real technology to begin with. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsUK...

Theranos fraud: Up close and personal with Elizabeth Holmes' charm and lies | 60 Minutes Australia

YouTube video by 60 Minutes Australia

youtube.com

Zuckerberg shut down No Kings on Meta Trump banned news outlets from the White House Now TikTok wants to erase the “Musk” documentary Billionaires wants to control our information, because they believe uninformed masses are compliant-and more profitable for them This will backfire Spectacularly

Alex Gibney@alexgibneyfilm.bsky.social · 2w ago

Note: TikTok - 15% owned by Musk pal Larry Ellison - permanently banned our "Musk" the movie account on the platform. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politic...

After everything that AI has done to decimate funding for biology research (and biotech companies with actual products), it will be poetic justice when biology pops the AI bubble.

As luck would have it, my PhD advisor Mike Greenberg happened to be in Barcelona at the same time as me. Like a science-y version of a Whit Stillman movie, we chatted about engrams and enhancers while dining over tapas and strolling through the city.

A nice demonstration of how much confounding factors in cohort studies can create spurious associations To hyper-generalize, it demonstrates the fragility of association, which vary by conditions. Yet association is the main (only?) mechanism by which AI can build biology models

Was fun celebrating the recent Nobel with many of the pioneers in optogenetics at Optogen 2026 in beautiful Barcelona — a great place to reunite with old friends. The conference brought together wide range of approaches, from optical methods to new indicators to clinical trials

The joke in the 2000s was that "China" was the answer to every investing question, when in the 1990s it was "the internet". Now we have the double-whammy occurring for biotech, with the reason to not try anything new in the US being China AND computers.

Celebration at Stanford Bioengineering for Karl Deisseroth’s Nobel Prize. His commitment to teaching came up, and Karl said something very interesting: that one of the best feelings is finishing a classroom session and thinking it went well, that the students learned something. Completely agree!

Excited to share a new study from our lab in Cell: “Non-invasive control of gene editing in vivo by photoswitchable Cas12f and focused ultrasound” We engineered a compact CRISPR system that can be activated at specific locations in the body using focused ultrasound (🧵) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Non-invasive control of gene editing in vivo by photoswitchable Cas12f and focused ultrasound

Remote activation of a single-AAV-deliverable photoswitchable Cas12f system enables precise spatial and temporal control of genome editing in deep tissues without surgery or implanted devices.

cell.com

#ICYMI Faculty Fellow @michaelzlin.bsky.social and team have developed RASER, a novel therapeutic approach that sharpens the precision of certain cancer treatments while sparing healthy tissue: med.stanford.edu/cancer/about...

Cutting through cancer with RASER: A new approach to metastatic disease

By prioritizing treatment precision and minimizing toxicity, the RASER system offers hope for patients living with metastatic cancers.

med.stanford.edu

Today I’m excited to share our new study in Nature Biomedical Engineering, in which we used protein engineering to create a therapeutic able to completely eradicate metastatic ovarian cancer in mice. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Rewiring oncogenic signalling to precision ablation of metastatic cancer - Nature Biomedical Engineering

An engineered ErbB oncogene-selective virus shows improved safety and efficacy for treating mouse models of ErbBr/HER2 positive ovarian cancer, showing promise for curing early cases and substantially...

nature.com

Excited to announce big steps for electrical imaging in the brain! In 4 preprints, we and collaborators present 2 new GFP-based voltage sensors: ASAP6c for high-throughput spike recordings, and ASAP7y for subthreshold 1P and 2P imaging bit.ly/4x3k3kX bit.ly/3RKZhq3 bit.ly/4o4fKl3 bit.ly/4uHXuk3 🧵

The Lin Lab is hiring! We're seeking motivated postdocs for projects on voltage imaging and optogenetics in the brain. If you're excited to develop new methods to undersatand and correct brain diseases, working together with other neuroscience labs at Stanford, drop us a line!

Happy to reveal our latest work, Microbe-Independent Deep Assembly and Screening (MIDAS), a method for engineering proteins >10x more cheaply and quickly than before. MIDAS addresses the slowest step in protein engineering — construction and expression of variants — by skipping cloning entirely

Sarafan ChEM-H@stanford-chemh.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Faculty Fellow Michael Lin introduces MIDAS, a new method that builds and tests thousands of protein variants in days instead of weeks - delivering an order-of-magnitude improvement in speed and cost and advancing how proteins are engineered and studied:

It is with a heavy heart that I share the devastating news that my wonderful PhD student, Pengli Wang, passed away on Friday, May 1, at the age of 28, in an unexpected accident. I’ve struggled to write this because it is hard to put into words just how much Pengli meant...

Small selection of classroom doors decorated for Teachers Appreciation Week. It’s just Palo Alto School District, no pressure or anything 😄

The richest man owns X. The second and fourth richest men control Google. The third richest man owns The Washington Post. The fifth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

April 24th Update: We are at the lowest transmission levels in almost 5 years, 40% lower than our recent spring lows. This remarkable lull should last 6+more weeks. Estimates: 🔸90,000 new infections/day 🔸~1 in 750 currently reasonably infectious (5 day window)

Those of us doing research related to women’s health have been hit particularly hard by the govt’s sabotage of the NIH. I spoke to WaPo for this piece, as painful as it was to discuss the reality my lab is facing. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...

Where U.S. science has been hit hardest after Trump’s first year

The Trump administration has slashed the number of grants from the National Institutes of Health, with far fewer focused on women, cancer and mental health.

washingtonpost.com

Our group just received a new R01 that was delayed by many months- it should have been awarded ‘25, like the curve below. This grant had the highest score we’d ever received (2%-ile), yet funding was uncertain. With the delay we had to lay people off. Very inefficient. And we are the lucky ones.

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 7mo ago

The story includes a funding curve graph showing the delay in making new and competitive renewal grants. 2/8

“Amid the search for a new CDC director, some well-qualified candidates sought promises of autonomy to be able to fire and hire staff and to keep science insulated from political influence. Those candidates were not selected, sources told the Post.” arstechnica.com/health/2026/...

Trump picks qualified, normal health leader to head CDC; experts still cautious

She's well qualified but will need to navigate RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine agenda.

arstechnica.com

Erica Schwartz could fix the CDC — as long as she’s not blocked by higher-ups

Trump’s CDC Pick Looks Solid. The Real Risk Is RFK Jr

President Donald Trump has wisely sidestepped controversy by choosing former deputy surgeon general Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

bloom.bg

Just came across this wonderful recording of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Soloist Julia Fischer is absolutely amazing. The videography brings out every note and every instrument, better than having a front-row seat. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SshD...

Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor | Julia Fischer, Dresden Philharmonic & Michael Sanderling

YouTube video by DW Classical Music

youtube.com

The NSF GRFP is now out! There are 2,599 awardees, which is the most ever—and a big shift from last year which initially halved awardees (1,000 awardees + an additional 500). I've thrown together a plot to break down the changes by field. www.research.gov/grfp/Awardee...

At a glance, 2599 recipients - I think the highest total ever? And quite a few in the Life Sciences, which I know was a concern for many - Evolutionary Biology had twice as many recipients (38) as last year (19).

Holly Moeller@mixotrophe.bsky.social · 7mo ago

NSF GRFP results are out! Awardees: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... Honorable Mention: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... (Our team members didn't get emails but discovered the lists through Reddit. Confirmed by logging in to the website and checking.) #NSF #GRFP