Figure showing number of competitive grants mentioning women from 2015-2025. The number was rising until recently, with a precipitous drop in the last year.

At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years.

Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.”

wapo.st/4euUt1c

Excited to share our new findings in @science.org on how the DRT3 bacterial defense system uses a reverse transcriptase that builds DNA repeats without a nucleic acid template. Microbes never cease to amaze!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Other Colleges Have Frat Houses. This One Has a Cookie House.

BREAKING GOOD NEWS: There is a house at @carleton.edu where you can bake cookies at basically any time. I spent 12 straight hours in the kitchen and came back for breakfast the next morning: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/d...

Biologists Confirm Not Much Evolution Happened Today STANFORD, CA—Calling it a “pretty slow one” as far as natural selection and genetic drift were concerned, biologists from Stanford University confirmed Tuesday that not much evolution happened today. ...

Biologists Confirm Not Much Evolution Happened Today — theonion.com/biologists-c...

Early Career Faculty Program | Freeman Hrabowski Scholars | HHMI The Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program offers comprehensive support to outstanding early career faculty committed to scientific excellence in their own research, and to fostering labs that expand the ...

This program transformed my career! Please apply.

@hhmi-science.bsky.social's #FreemanHrabowski Scholars Program offers early career faculty up to $10M over 10 yrs, plus salary & benefits. Postdoc? This year's competition has a program for you too. Applications open 11/3! bit.ly/4vhC0LA

NSF names record number of graduate fellows, rebounding from 2025 dip Distribution by field is also closer to the norm than last year’s class

NSF names record number of graduate fellows, rebounding from 2025 dip

www.science.org/content/arti...

The Social Lives of Viruses is coming to Vancouver, Canada, from 4th-8th August 2026!

This is a free meeting dedicated to all aspects of virus-virus interactions & evolution.

To apply: socialviruses.zoology.ubc.ca

@sociovirology.bsky.social #socialviruses #evosky #lovevirology #virosky

Spread the word! UChicago BSD is currently searching for an instructional professor (open rank) to help develop and support graduate training in quantitative biology at UChicago. This is an Instructional Professor position (open rank). apply.interfolio.com/183517.

We are recruiting 1-2 postdoctoral fellows to investigate the specificity of human anti-influenza virus antibodies, and to determine how these antibodies impact global antigenic drift of influenza viruses.

Join our lab at Penn in Philly. Reach out if you are interested in applying! Please repost!

I’m a Nobel Prize-winning immigrant. I can no longer recognize this country. Attacks on science and immigrants are destroying America.

Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak “This country has given me endless opportunities…: The America we inhabit today bears almost no resemblance to the country I chose all those years ago” newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-a-nobel...

1000 people started spontaneously chanting U-S-A in the San Diego air and space museum at splashdown And you know what? FUND AMERICAN SCIENCE. Imagine who we could be.

A few have suggested that some aspects of this mission--joy, international teamwork, diversity--are being played up to stick it to the hateful attitude of the administration. But I don't think it's that. I think it's just that those things are essential to and inseparable from a mission like this.

Here you go...

You can always check yourself at grant-witness.us/funding_curv...

#itsallsteamanyway

U.S. Forest Service unveils extensive closures of research facilities Cost-cutting move is expected to cause resignations and turmoil

What will happen to the 82 USFS experimental forests around the country? Many sites have decades-long experiments that are tracking how forests are changed by timber harvesting practices and climate change. As I say here, “you can't just pick up an experimental forest site and move it to SLC.”

Today is the anniversary of the April 1 RIFs at NIH and HHS.

Thinking of my colleagues who lost their jobs last year.

These cuts did no improve efficiency. They undermined the functioning of our government.

Frontiers | First genome sequence and functional profiling of Psychrobacter SC65A.3 preserved in 5,000-year-old cave ice: insights into ancient resistome, antimicrobial potential, and enzymatic activi... IntroductionAncient cryospheric environments may preserve overlooked reservoirs of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and bioactive potential. This study reports...

Genome sequence of a 5,000 year old bacterium (Psychrobacter) from cave ice contains more than 100 genes associated with antimicrobial resistance 😳

www.frontiersin.org/journals/mic...

Now out in AEM @asm.org! 🎉🧪

*High school student-isolated mutants 👉🏻 novel genetic causes of biofilm-associated adaptations
*We learn how diversity arises quickly and is maintained
*EvolvingSTEM enables scalable research in classrooms & promotes scientific literacy

journals.asm.org/eprint/FBU9M...

Can I change your mind about DNA? My first book, BEYOND INHERITANCE, descries a sea change in how we talk about our genes. It comes out in a couple weeks—preorder your copy or audiobook version (narrated by me) today: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711682...

This is what democracy looks like.

Now, prepare to VOTE and get everyone you know to do likewise.

CBS turned their news operation into propaganda, kicked Colbert off the air for making too much trouble, and all that just to have Charles Barkley go on the air on one of their most-watched telecasts of the year and say this lmao

That is equivalent to 2/3rds the population of Saint Paul

For more researchers, securing NIH funding becomes a ‘pipe dream’ The National Institutes of Health received a small appropriations bump for fiscal year 2026, but concerns beyond spending levels abound

Good story in C&E News about damage to the scientific enterprise and loss of confidence from researchers about having a trusted partner in the federal government.

nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

David Botstein, Gene-Mapping Pioneer, Dies at 83

David Botstein was one of the giants of genetics and genomics, and my mentor, colleague and friend for more than 40 years. I’m sad that he is gone, but his larger-than-life persona comes through here. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/s...

Matt Ridley gave the inaugural "NIH Scientific Freedom Lecture Series" earlier today and I just wanted to run through some of the main claims he made - you'll be unsurprised to learn that almost all of them are false.

Here's his summary slide - let's start there.

🧵👇

Breakthrough study in plant immunity reveals previously unsuspected… The wheat WAI3 receptor forms a novel defence-activating resistosome made of eight molecules, as revealed by an international collaboration led by The Sainsbury Laboratory

Exciting news!

New findings from TSL and international collaborators reveal that the wheat receptor WAI3 forms an octameric resistosome, offering fresh insights into plant immune system structures and functions 🌱

@jonathandgjones.bsky.social @kamounlab.bsky.social

www.tsl.ac.uk/news/breakth...

Here is the thing about basic science research.

You never know where it will end up. But you can be guaranteed that there would not be the progress we have had were it not for robust support of basic science research.

All of this is now threatened.

Cover of the March 2026 issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution. The image is inspired by Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man and depicts clonal evolution within our bodies and pathogens that affect our health via different sized circles within the man and images of microbes around the edges. There is a phylogenetic tree representing evolutionary approaches to medicine.

Our March issue is a Focus on "Evolution in medicine", out now! www.nature.com/natecolevol/...

Including research & opinion on:

➡️Somatic evolution and health
➡️Predicting intrahost evolution
➡️Collateral sensitivity during antibiotic therapy

Cover illustration by Alex Cagan @atjcagan.bsky.social

A line graph showing the fraction of R01 applications funded as a function of percentile for NIGMS. The estimated success rate for FY2024 was 14.1% compared with 8.6% for FY2025.

7/25