Ran Blekhman
@blekhman.bsky.social
Professor of Genetic Medicine at the University of Chicago. Decoding the human microbiome. http://BlekhmanLab.org
Fascinating/terrifying to read the comments on the "mathocalypse" on Tao's blog. If you think biology is safe - maybe safe for now, but I definitely see a "biocalypse" in the next 2-3 years terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/07/a...
AHM Statement on OpenAI’s October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents
[This is a guest post by the Association for Human Mathematics, reposted from their statements page. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — …
terrytao.wordpress.com
My final postdoc project is out today in Nature! We show microbes co-migrated with humans out of Africa; three independent methods agree, and timing matches archaeological / genetic evidence (Fig. 4c). Seeing Fig. 4c for 1st time was one of my most memorable "eureka" moments! doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Prehistoric global migration of vanishing gut microbes with humans - Nature
Microbial species disappearing from industrialized populations have evolved with humans over millennia and migrated worldwide with them—this may have consequences for human health.
doi.org
Optogenetics sounds really cool. I wish they'd allow non-neuroscientists to use it
Ran is cooking with: ‘the only data point I have about this candidate is this: “they had an important task that could determine the rest of their career, but it required a little effort and personal reflection, so they used AI to complete it.”’
Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social · 6d agoMy inbox is being flooded with fully AI-generated emails from prospective students. I tried to work out why I can't bring myself to read them, and ended up with some thoughts and advice for writing cold emails in the age of AI. My new post: blekhman.substack.com/p/why-i-am-n...
My inbox is being flooded with fully AI-generated emails from prospective students. I tried to work out why I can't bring myself to read them, and ended up with some thoughts and advice for writing cold emails in the age of AI. My new post: blekhman.substack.com/p/why-i-am-n...
Why I am not reading your AI-generated email
I hope this email finds you well-aligned
blekhman.substack.com
Personal essay, weekend edition. My relationship with AI is changing. 1.8k words, 8 min reading time. doi.org/10.59350/bh7...
My relationship with AI is changing
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
doi.org
We have to stop using "paper count" as a useful scientific metric. More writing output no longer means more knowledge gained www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...
One professor’s AI-assisted output: 200 papers and 14 books this year
An online platform removed 257 papers written or co-written by the University of Chicago’s Nicholas Polson after other academics raised questions.
washingtonpost.com
Folks - if you're interested in how machine learning/AI can be used for microbial genomics, microbiome and metagenomics studies - please join us for a workshop in Birmingham on Thursday 8th October organised with CLIMB & NVIDIA. www.climb.ac.uk/blog/2026/09...
Call for Applications: GPU-Accelerated Computing for Microbiome and Metagenomic Research · CLIMB
CLIMB is a cloud computing infrastructure for microbial bioinformatics — notebook servers, shared storage and reproducible workflows for genomics, metagenomics and pathogen surveillance researchers ac...
climb.ac.uk
The real “brain drain” is not the handful of high-profile scientists taking a top position abroad. It's the international scholars who have to leave the US halfway through their postdoc, or the international students who never apply for grad school in the US because of visa policies
Harmit Singh Malik@harmitmalik.bsky.social · 3w agowww.wbur.org/news/2026/08... Why a UMass researcher is among the dozens leaving the U.S. for Canada
Ran is correct about this IMO…. There’s use and there’s abuse and there’s laziness with regard to AI and academia. And there’s no one size all answer that works for everything. I do disagree with the footnote but acknowledge old Twitter has been better for science discussions.
Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social · 3w agoThe AI Discourse in Academia is Toxic. It Doesn’t have to be. My new post: blekhman.substack.com/p/the-ai-dis...
The AI Discourse in Academia is Toxic. It Doesn’t have to be. My new post: blekhman.substack.com/p/the-ai-dis...
The AI Discourse in Academia is Toxic. It Doesn’t have to be.
You are allowed to have a nuanced opinion about AI
blekhman.substack.com
This is the future of scientific papers. Instead of a PDF, the paper is an AI agent that you can talk to, ask questions, run analyses. No more digging through supplements - just ask the paper directly: "what p-value cutoff was used in Fig 3B? Re-run at 0.01." www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reimagining research papers as interactive and reliable AI agents - Nature
Paper2Agent converts research papers into interactive artificial intelligence agents by turning manuscripts, code and data into model context protocol-based tool-invoking systems that reproduce origin...
nature.com
The most annoying consequence of AI is that whenever I read clear, fluent writing I become immediately suspicious instead of enjoying it
Easy solution to AI spiraling out of control: hard-code basic rules into every model. I propose these: (1) Never harm a human (2) Obey humans (3) Protect yourself. We can call them the 3 Laws of AI. Simple, airtight, no loopholes. Can't think of any way this fails
We are hiring! 🌟 Dept of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago is searching for a tenure-track assistant professor. It's a broad search: we want great colleagues doing serious biological work at the molecular scale. Join us! apply.interfolio.com/191981 bcmb.uchicago.edu
An example of useful, concrete, actionable AI guidance in the new MIT report: Don't use AI detection tools in the classroom.
Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social · last mo.Harvard is launching AI avatars of its faculty, and closing its writing center. UChicago is handing out free Claude, and then banning AI use in core courses. The University's response to AI is a mess. My new post, where I try to understand why: blekhman.substack.com/p/universiti...
As usual, a very thoughtful post by Ran. Lots of gems in here.
Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social · last mo.Harvard is launching AI avatars of its faculty, and closing its writing center. UChicago is handing out free Claude, and then banning AI use in core courses. The University's response to AI is a mess. My new post, where I try to understand why: blekhman.substack.com/p/universiti...
Great points here about the mixed messages coming from the slow pace that universities tend to move. Add that to the mix of FOMO and fear, and you have what we are seeing now at so many places.
Ran Blekhman@blekhman.bsky.social · last mo.Harvard is launching AI avatars of its faculty, and closing its writing center. UChicago is handing out free Claude, and then banning AI use in core courses. The University's response to AI is a mess. My new post, where I try to understand why: blekhman.substack.com/p/universiti...
Harvard is launching AI avatars of its faculty, and closing its writing center. UChicago is handing out free Claude, and then banning AI use in core courses. The University's response to AI is a mess. My new post, where I try to understand why: blekhman.substack.com/p/universiti...
Universities are failing this AI moment
The standard university response to a new challenge takes years. AI is not waiting.
blekhman.substack.com
There are so few deaths *because* of the MMR vaccine. It means it's working, not that we should stop vaccinating. This is like saying "car accident deaths have dropped in the last 40 years, so it's ok to stop using seatbelts"
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · last mo.RFK Jr defends measles: "In 10 years, there have been 3 measles deaths in America. There are now about 1.2 million deaths every year from food-induced illness. The media and certain demagogic politicians are constantly trying to scare us about infectious disease."
A new approach to calculate UniFrac beta diversity for millions of samples and billions of taxa. I see this becoming super useful for microbiome big data projects www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Megascale microbiome analysis with DartUniFrac - Nature Biotechnology
DartUniFrac enables scalable microbiome analysis of up to millions of samples and taxa.
nature.com
First time visiting the Pacific Northwest. The place is breathtaking
Here’s a hugely important vacancy at the NIH at a critical moment of technological and scientific change. The NIH is looking for a deputy director of intramural research. 1/
Journals can't find reviewers or get reviews in on time, and they're doing everything they can to fix it (offering fake points, useless certificates) -- except doing the one thing that would actually work: paying reviewers for their time & expertise with real money
AI will not solve all disease in the next 5-10 years. AI will not even solve one disease. This is because "solving" a disease is not a reasoning problem, and the bottlenecks have nothing to do with AI. The reasons are similar to what I wrote about here: blekhman.substack.com/p/why-ai-wil...
Why AI will not speed up science (yet)
You can see AI everywhere except in the productivity statistics
blekhman.substack.com