santiago, phd 🐈⬛
@santiagokique.bsky.social
Vnzln 🇻🇪 MD/PhD candidate @ Stanford 🌲 I study telomere biology in health and disease; I write about science and politics blogs @ primafacie.substack.com
I had a patient with ADEM on Peds. A healthy teen living a normal life, suddenly unable to walk, speak, eat, could only recognize his mother. A former honor student now deeply cognitively impaired. Hospitalized for months and lost effectively all their muscle mass. (1/2)
NSF will no longer be giving grants to individuals based on their ideas, but pivot towards “implementing Trump’s golden age of science” www.science.org/content/arti...
NSF memo implementing Trump’s ‘golden age’ of science unsettles researchers
New document emphasizes support for White House priorities over curiosity-driven ideas
science.org
We’re long past evidence mattering in this discussion but I remember when “natural evolution can’t do furin cleavage sites” was the fulcrum of lab leak discourse. Well here’s another naturally evolved furin cleavage site in beta coronavirus. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A divergent betacoronavirus with a functional furin cleavage site in South American bats - Nature Communications
There is still limited data reported on virus diversity in South American bats. In this study, the authors report a divergent betacoronavirus with a functional furin cleavage site in South American ba...
nature.com
After years of harping on about the “biomedical security state”, Jay Bhattacharya has signed away hundreds of millions of biomedical research dollars to the U.S.’ doomed imperial exploits www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Revealed: inside the US military's plan to tap huge sums from the NIH
An agreement paves the way for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects to be transferred from the NIH’s institute for infectious diseases to the Department of Defense.
nature.com
I’m not gonna discourse the term “woke 1” cuz it’s pointless but I wrote pretty much everything I had to say about how it was crazy here: primafacie.substack.com/p/spare-the-...
spare the rod 1
reviewing institutional discipline from George Floyd in 2020 to Palestine in 2023
primafacie.substack.com
He also shared an interesting story I didn’t know about: his work as a research fellow devising the first treatment for GPA (then called Wegener’s polyangiitis). A very simple idea grounded in solid understanding of basic biology. At the time he was an NIH fellow, … www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....
Cyclophosphamide Therapy of Severe Systemic Necrotizing Vasculitis | NEJM
We studied 17 patients with severe systemic necrotizing vasculitis over an 11-year-period. Sixteen patients were treated daily with cyclophosphamide (2 mg per kilogram per day), and one was treated...
nejm.org
Re-upping this bc this man whose dedicated his entire life to public service is being dragged through the mud by the dumbest and worst faith people on earth to provide a side-show for their rapidly evaporating political base of rabid conspiracists
santiago, phd 🐈⬛@santiagokique.bsky.social · 4mo agoDr. Fauci came to Stanford for Medicine grand rounds and shared a few reflections I thought were worth passing on: The first was about Operation Warp Speed and the current state of the NIH. As you’ll recall the first mRNA vax was developed at record speed. Fauci atttributes that success to 4 factors
Imagine not being able to accrue your clinical trial bc a mob of degen gamblers w/ no knowledge of medicine, biology, pharma, or trials is split 60/40 against hitting your endpoints www.statnews.com/2026/07/16/k... via @statnews.com
Kalshi comes for biopharma, with prediction markets for clinical trials and FDA approvals
Prediction markets have permeated the worlds of sports, politics, and reality television shows. Now, the biopharma industry could be next.
statnews.com
tf is this dawg if you need a laser to call an offsides it’s not offside. Paid for by Big Ronaldo
I think a good metaphor for biology amid the “can we just compute biology” discourse is trying to deduce the existence and specific rules of the game of futbol from a table of the different kinds of shoes worn by everyone inside a stadium at any given time
From the MIT president, Sally Kornbluth, a good distillation of the current mood in science: technically, it has never been a more exciting time to be in biomedical research; politically and economically, everyone is at the lowest they’ve ever been. www.statnews.com/2026/05/27/s...
MIT president: Why so many optimistic scientists are losing heart
“This erosion of our strength is a loss for the nation,” writes MIT President Sally Kornbluth.
statnews.com
This is facts I saw 2 pheos in one week on endocrine surgery lol
Dr. Fauci came to Stanford for Medicine grand rounds and shared a few reflections I thought were worth passing on: The first was about Operation Warp Speed and the current state of the NIH. As you’ll recall the first mRNA vax was developed at record speed. Fauci atttributes that success to 4 factors
New blog post about that Science paper from a couple of weeks ago that tested LLMs against ED physicians in a retrospective “trial” of differential diagnosis open.substack.com/pub/primafac...
AI performs at the level of an intern?
RE: "Performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician." Science 2026
open.substack.com
New blog post about that Science paper from a couple of weeks ago that tested LLMs against ED physicians in a retrospective “trial” of differential diagnosis open.substack.com/pub/primafac...
AI performs at the level of an intern?
RE: "Performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician." Science 2026
open.substack.com
Good Op-Ed this week from first-year medical students re: the recently announced DOJ investigation into Stanford admissions stanforddaily.com/2026/04/19/d...
The DOJ is targeting Stanford Medicine's nonexistent problem
Akeke and Zhang defend against the DOJ's investigation into Stanford Medicine and advocate for the importance of diversity consideration in admissions.
stanforddaily.com
this 100% AI generated image is spooking folks rightfully concerned about research integrity. Yes, it’s very realistic albeit too clean. My humble proposal: perfect use case for blockchain. Gel reader generates token when image canned with “for pub” setting, tracked through editors/Illustrator
I have to read this one in short spurts. It is killing me. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/b...
Trump Slashed Science Funding. Now the U.S. Could Face a Costly Brain Drain.
nytimes.com
“For weeks, the FDA has been asking a raw-dairy farm in California to recall its Cheddar cheese, which the agency has linked to nine E. coli illnesses in California, Texas and Florida. On Thursday, the dairy farm, Raw Farm LLC, finally complied, though it said it was doing so “under protest”
‘Under Protest,’ Raw Dairy Farm Recalls Cheddar Linked to 9 E. Coli Cases
nytimes.com
The 2020s? You mean first decade of the Iran war?
The Trump admin is launching an “investigation” into “racial discrimination” in medical school admissions at 3 schools, including ours. In light of this, reposting one of my old blog posts about the longstanding obsession around race and merit in medicine substack.com/@primafacie/...
santiago e sanchez (@primafacie)
In light of the scotus ruling, re-sharing my post on the myth of meritocracy and the conservative crusade against AA https://open.substack.com/pub/primafacie/p/best-and-brightest?r=1wbx1d&utm_medium=...
substack.com
the fundamental issue with american education, deeply infecting both parties, is thinking that learning is primarily about children consuming content that is being delivered and being graded on how well they retain it, rather than learning being a process that teaches a student *how to learn*
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 6mo agoLinda McMahon: "The alpha school that I visited, the first two hours of every day, every student is getting AI instruction on different subjects. I mean, it's a real concentrated, focused effort. They're not replacing teachers. There is a teacher there who is monitoring what's going on."
EXCLUSIVE: Vaccination rates among young children in Michigan dropped sharply during the first year of the Trump administration, providing an early indication of how vaccine-skeptic Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is influencing immunization practices. www.reuters.com/business/hea...
Child vaccination rate drops sharply in Michigan under RFK Jr's influence
Vaccination rates among young children in Michigan dropped sharply during the first year of the Trump administration, a Reuters analysis of state data shows, providing an early indication of how vacci...
reuters.com
I'm glad to see this being covered - because, frankly, this is a death-blow to collaborative science - however, the assumption of good faith in any of these decisions by reporters is mind-boggling. This is happening for one reason - to assure top-down control of what gets funded and what does not.
Max Kozlov@maxkozlov.bsky.social · 6mo agoThe US NIH is stepping back from 'top-down' science. My latest analysis for @nature.com shows that funding calls have plummeted by 90%, funneling billions into broad, 'investigator-initiated' ideas, rather than targeted, agency-driven ones. A massive shift for the American biomedical enterprise.
Love 2 have spent the last 10 years of my life training to be a physician scientist! Only 6 more years to go!
Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 7mo agoGood story from Vox on falling numbers of new and competitive renewal R01 grants. [Gift Link] www.vox.com/future-perfe... 1/5
