Tessera
Folgen

Frank the Fly Guy

@frankmac.bsky.social

👨🏽‍🔬 🧬 🪰🔬🏳️‍🌈 Assistant Professor in SoCal. Developmental biologist by training, but I’m a shameless science dilettante. He/him/his.

34 Posts54 Follower67 Folgt
Darby Saxbe@darbysaxbe.bsky.social · 2y ago

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

list of banned keywords
Dr Craig R McClain@drcraigmc.bsky.social · 2y ago

Somewhere in the U.S., there’s a scientist staring at their NSF/NIH grant application wondering why they bother. This post is for you. Science and society both need you. Hang in there and know there is a whole community supporting you.

Maureen Barr@barrlab.bsky.social · 2y ago

The Genetics Society of America @genetics-gsa.bsky.social is "advocating for science and for scientists. We seek to cultivate an inclusive, diverse research community that engages with the public...& serves as an authoritative source of information." Pls consider joining genetics-gsa.org/membership/

Join or Renew Membership - Genetics Society of America

Visit our website to learn more.

genetics-gsa.org

Miriam Goldstein@miriamgoldstein.bsky.social · 2y ago

🧵: I am getting texts on what scientists should do in this perilous and scary moment. My advice: your biggest power is to organize through your professional societies. A few ideas -

Frank the Fly Guy@frankmac.bsky.social · 2y ago

This is astoundingly incorrect. At conception, everyone is sex-less. Through early development, everyone is female-presenting. Cis XX men exist. Cis XY women exist. Intersex people exist. Trans people exist. This is a blatant attempt at justifying further attacks on body autonomy.

A screen shot of text on white background. The top lines say: (d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. The word ‘conception’ is highlighted in orange. The bottom lines say: (e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell. The word ‘conception’ is highlighted in yellow.
Frank the Fly Guy@frankmac.bsky.social · 2y ago

Great perspective. There needs to be a paradigm shift in how ‘mechanism’ is defined not only in #devbio but in other fields as well.

Development@dev-journal.bsky.social · 2y ago

A case for broadening our view of mechanism in developmental biology Read this Perspective Article from B. Duygu Özpolat @biyolokum.bsky.social , Swathi Arur @swathiarur.bsky.social and Mansi Srivastava: https://journals.biologists.com/dev/article/152/2/dev204605/365016/

Word clouds summarizing answers to survey questions. (A) Question 1: In your area of work, what is the most common interpretation of the term ‘mechanism’ as applied to research questions? The most common word is 'Gene', followed by 'Process', 'Molecular' and 'Cell'. (B) Question 2: When you assess work in your field, what do you look for in terms of a mechanistic understanding of development? The most common word is 'Cell', followed by 'Look', 'Level', 'Process' and 'Gene'.
Frank the Fly Guy@frankmac.bsky.social · 3y ago

One of the students in my Intro to Biology class baked cookies depicting the steps of mitosis and meiosis (using sprinkles to highlight homologous recombination and independent assortment), and I have never had more hope in the next generation until now. Also, mei-dough-sis, amirite?

Home-made frosted cookies depicting metaphase I, anaphase I, and telophase I of meiosis, with color-code chromatids depicting homologous recombination