"The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies". Yuuup! 🧪

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 2w ago

@dereklowe.bsky.social lets loose again (and I am still here for it). www.science.org/content/blog... 1/2

Yes, the administrators with their giant salaries seem less invested in the fight. Funny that

AAUP@aaup.org · 2w ago

It's the faculty, not the people running these institutions, that the report credits with the only real wins. "If there has been a silver lining to the cloud that is the Trump compliance campaign," the report emphasizes, "it has been the mobilization of the faculty." 5

The Haricharan lab is hiring! We're looking for a postdoc to join us in sunny San Diego on our beautiful campus @sdsurf.bsky.social. You'll be studying how a person's life experiences can affect their tumor biology and response to tx. Apply here. careers-sdsurf.icims.com/jobs/20659/p... 🧪

When did we stop requiring moral clarity from our leaders and started lauding their pragmatism instead? If we can't expect moral clarity from academic leaders, the rot runs deep

The other alternatives to believing the score is biased is that to believe that: - that "exceptional" manuscripts are more likely to be by men or - the score does not really measure "exceptional" manuscripts Which is it?

Last year I proposed at faculty meeting that as a Biology dept we should make critical thinking part of our UG and grad school curriculum. I was told students could take philosophy to get that content. We need to be teaching our students critical thinking now www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

We Have Never Taught Critical Thinking (opinion)

AI just makes those failures evident.

insidehighered.com

I got spotlit! So honored that a student found my lab's work interesting and inspiring. scientistspotlights.org/about-us/

"Louis Pasteur said that chance “favors only the prepared mind.” Public money pays for the trained person, the prepared mind, to be paying attention when a lucky accident happens." www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/o... 🧪 1/4

Opinion | The Science That Turned Lizard Venom Into GLP-1s Is Under Attack

nytimes.com

"a black presidency is a contradiction—it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad... no paywall: archive.ph/SSLbJ#select...

Dominique Baker@bakerdphd.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Whew www.vanityfair.com/story/the-ne...

US will serve as negative control

Kathleen Bachynski@bachynski.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“Norway is imposing a near ban on the use of generative AI tools by elementary school pupils while also restricting their use in the education of older children to prevent a ‌negative impact on learning, the country's prime minister said on Friday." @jackiantonovich.bsky.social

"The vagueness of what actually constitutes “DEI” has allowed the administration to lean on its most potent tool, the self-censorship of the scientific community." So true. Our premature capitulation is something we will look back on with regret and shame, I suspect. Or at least some of us. 🧪

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Powerful piece from two former NIH staffers www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Not that different from status quo maybe 🧪

Mel Andrews@bayesianboy.bsky.social · 2mo ago

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

This is so interesting to me given I've heard multiple industry people tell me they can't trust academia

Reese Richardson@reeserichardson.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of... Please comment here www.federalregister.gov/documents/20... if you want science in the US to NOT be destroyed. Open for comments till July 13th, so spread the word 🧪

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule

Russell Vought is going to destroy American Science

elizabethginexi.substack.com

While BioNtech & Moderna become household names because of their Covid vaccines, those emerged from different projects: finding ways to treat the most challenging cancers. They hypothesized that we could vaccinate patients against their own tumors, & evidence is mounting that they were right! 1/n 🧪

Really surprised and disappointed to see these analyses of American reading habits. The top 4% of readers read almost half the total number of books read by Americans last year. That is crazy. 40% of Americans read 0 books last year (this includes listening to audiobooks. yougov.com/en-us/articl...

Academic freedom nosediving is an important bellwether of the erosion of a people's right to knowledge, education and upward mobility

Michael Clemens@mclem.org · 3mo ago

The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country. www.chemistryworld.com/news/academi... Raw data from @vdeminstitute.bsky.social —> academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

Shout out from @sdsuresearch.bsky.social on our recent paper looking at subcellular localization of proteins ss a sometimes overlooked high potential avenue for cancer biomarker discovery. Finding the right patient for the tx is a battle that continues to be fought www.sdsu.edu/news/2026/04... 🧬🧪

Study uncovers potential cancer treatment that is readily available | News | SDSU

SDSU researchers have identified a solution to reduce mortality in the deadliest type of breast cancer

sdsu.edu

Svasti Haricharan@svasti.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Good science news to greet the holidays. Our paper is now out @natcomms.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Outstanding work by two of my postdocs, Aloran and Tyler, and collabs with Nic Fusco, Carol Manhart @templechemistry.bsky.social & Matthew Bainbridge @radychildrensoc.bsky.social 🧵🧪/1

Just read on the NIH funding blog about how centralized NIH peer review is strengthening efficiency, competition and transparency. grants.nih.gov/news-events/... Thinking of beginning a research line into alternate universes to answer the q "Am I high or are they high" #AcademicSky 🧬

Huge shout out to my postdoc, Dr. Tyler DeWitt #notonhere for an outstanding talk at #AACR2026 yesterday. He presented our story on the molecular underpinnings of breast cancer outcome disparities (currently in revision in Cancer Research @aacrjournals.bsky.social) with panache #breastcancer 🧪

Every day I talk to other cancer researchers, committed to soldiering on as long as poss, but many of us see the writing on the wall & cannot help but be despondent. Pharma co.s otoh are happy to tell us that if we cannot make breakthroughs, they'll take ones from China. So there's that, I suppose.🧪

Colette Delawalla, PhD@cdelawalla.bsky.social · 5mo ago

The people developing the treatment for your cancer diagnosis in 25 years are not ok. American Science is not ok...and Republicans are letting it happen. www.statnews.com/2026/03/19/n...

Everything happened because of someone else (unconnected to POTUS), he is a disinterested scientist only motivated by a love of humanity, butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. The absence of any attempt at taking ownership of the debacle that is American research today was appalling to watch

Jenna Norton@jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 5mo ago

In response to a question from Pocan about students choosing not to enter science careers given the instability during the House Appropriations Hearing, Bhattacharya insists the US is the best place for biomedical research. He ignores the very real disruption that occurred last year under his watch.

I read this piece, and I'm not going to lie, it is deeply shocking to think that we have gone so far off the rails that we can think and write and publish that the main purpose of a graduate student is to "be productive" on day 1.

Justin Kiggins@neuromusic.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Huh. It's almost like grad students are treated as cheap labor who have been undercut by a cheaper labor source 🤔 cc @drugmonkey.bsky.social www.science.org/content/arti...

"Sometimes what you need is a front-loaded award ... so it's perfectly scientifically justified" The lies upon lies, the misdirection, the prevarication, it's exhausting, no wonder he doesn't sleep

Jenna Norton@jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Bhattacharya claims NIH got all fund out the door last year. In spite of his leadership, not because of it. MYF was a big part of this, meaning the funds did get out but many fewer studies were funded.

So, his claim is that the payline going down from 30% to <10% is because scientists are submitting more applications? Bro with some circular thinking here. I wish House reps were better educated in the how research funding works so they could push back against rank deceit 🧪

PBS News@pbsnews.org · 5mo ago

The NIH, under the Trump administration, cut or froze billions of dollars in research funding last year. https://to.pbs.org/4sUZLY6

donmoynihan.substack.com/p/american-b... The really sad thing is that a lot of scientists have also fallen for the Merchants of Doubt strategy and I hear many colleagues complain that science has become political, revealing a deep lack of understanding of how they have been manipulated themselves 🧪

In gearing up to teach a big pre-med requirement class next semester, I love this idea www.science.org/content/arti...

If you'd like to work on this gorgeous campus with my lab, consider applying here: careers-sdsurf.icims.com/jobs/20123/r... We're looking for someone to join us as a tech and grow into a lab manager position. To learn more about the lab: www.haricharanlab.com 🧪

Dr. Arun Sethuraman@arunsethuraman.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Speaking of our gorgeous campus - here is the first set of buildings on Montezuma Mesa from 1930 (pic courtesy www.sdsu.edu/about/facts-...). Recognize the Life Sciences South where my office is? Lol. Happy 129th birthday, @sandiegostate.bsky.social!

Gorgeous recent sunset from our beautiful Spanish revival campus (pic from SDSU’s LinkedIn page). Too pretty to not share! ❤️