Send us your stem cell manuscripts! Very easy to transfer from biorxiv and we can also quickly consider a manuscript based on reviews received elsewhere. JCS does a tremendous job of supporting the scientific community (see the link below). Reach out if you have questions!
Feb 1 deadline approaching for our @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social QBio summer course on Physical Principles of Morphogenesis in Plants and Animals. @streichan.bsky.social
@maurazimmermann.bsky.social @maizel-lab.org @yusuke-mori.bsky.social @akankshi.bsky.social @nicolettapetridou.bsky.social
As stressful as it is to run a laboratory in the US right now, my thoughts are often with the NIH staff living in the awful chaos trying to preserve the whole enterprise. I’m grateful for every moment they choose not to give up. These people are the only thing keeping it from entirely collapsing.
Happy to share our latest preprint. We show that juxtaposing amnion cells with human pluripotent cells is enough to trigger gastrulation-like events. Great work by former student Xiangyu Kong now a postdoc in the Theunissen lab @washumedicine.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The "Big Beautiful Bill" isn’t the federal budget—it’s a reconciliation bill focused on tax cuts. The real FY26 funding decisions for NIH, NSF, and more are happening now in Congress.
www.ascb.org/science-poli...
Iowa: Sen. Ernst Maine: Sen. Collins Missouri: Sen. Hawley North Carolina: Sen. Tillis Ohio: Sen. Husted Utah: Sen. Curtis West Virginia: Sen. Capito
If one of these people is your senator, it is incredibly important that you call them today.
Urge them to vote NO on the Senate budget bill that would make most Americans poorer to give billionaires a tax cut they don't even need.
Today, my NIH colleagues and I did something scary but really important. We spoke up about egregious harms we are seeing happen to research participants and public health through thoughtless and politicized policies at NIH. 🧵1/3
apnews.com/article/nih-...
NEW: The Trump administration cut research funding that sought cures for future pandemics, examined the causes of dementia and tried to prevent HIV transmission.
ProPublica heard from more than 150 researchers to understand the work that’s been lost.
Happy to share our latest on a system to study anterior-posterior patterning of the nervous system. We show Wnt signaling pattern is not a simple low to high gradient and timing of activation is crucial to setting the pattern. From outstanding grad student Siqi Du.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Our work on mesoderm development in 2D gastruloids is now published in nature methods
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Many people are asking - what on earth is the point of killing biomedical research? Read this from @joshtpm.bsky.social who has covered this very well. Admin is using funding to exert control over universities, they don't care about resulting damage to science. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-d...
ACTION ITEM-----ACTION ITEM
Implementation of Schedule F
This is what a lot of us have been worried about.
This allows for many civil service positions to replaced with political appointees. This could include NIH institute directors and even POs.
BUT THERE IS A COMMENT PERIOD...
1/n
A letter to Republican Senators from concerned federal workers at NIH.
I received this letter, sent to 11 Republican members of Congress this weekend from anonymous NIHers.
1/n
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As someone directly affected by this, let me be clear:
I'd rather lose my job because Harvard chose to fight than keep my job and see a generation of white supremacists parade its corpse around like a war trophy.
This is a big deal. Spread the word. But it’s tiny compared to the totality of what’s happening at NIH. Cure Research for all cancers, Alzheimer’s, everything is being gutted. Intentionally. It’s all getting burned to the ground but the news isn’t getting out. The new cures won’t be there for you.
From a source at NIH:
“Right now NIH’s ability to buy things is dead. Nearly all people with the power to make an order — purchasing people — have been removed.
The NIH hospital can’t buy medicines, the labs can’t buy petri dishes. X-Ray machine breaks? Too bad.
Everything is stopped”
It’s stunning to me that the New York Times did not put the story on the bloodbath at the NIH, CDC, and FDA on its front page this morning.
Graph from the Washington Post showing declines in spending at NIH. New grants cut from 1 billion to around 400 million. Overall grants down from 4.5 billion to 2.4 billion.
Trump has cut the NIH budget by more than half in defiance of Congressionally mandated appropriations for the agency. No comparison historically, not even the Great Recession. This is clearly not legal and Congress needs to address it.
"The consolidation/RIF plan pulls power away from scientists and puts it in the hands of political employees. It sets up Trump and Musk to kill NIH as an evidence-based science funder. We must stop this plan."
New contributed post on our blog: Please read.
It describes Orban and authoritarianism. 🧪
Just before bedtime last night I got a message from inside NIH which read:
“It’s so, so bad and no one cares (who has any influence)”
I asked “What, in particular?”
My friend responded “Everything”
Crowd at Lincoln memorial
The @standupforscience.bsky.social DC rally is on.
What we are hearing from around the country:
"this is big!"
"biggest rally I have seen around here in years and years"
The public cares about medical research--and students, GenZ, and other people too are ready to stand up.
Image of crowd at Rice Stand up for Science event
Good crowd to #StandUpForScience on Rice campus. Some powerful speeches from trainees about having opportunities suddenly taken from them and the personal impacts of the administration's targeting of minorities. Very real damage has already been done.
Richest guy in the world telling us we can’t afford to have our government fund cancer research.
We talk about Bezos, or Citi, or Big Tech, but cancer's brand is seriously in the toilet. Everyone hates it. And yet, day one hit from Trump/Musk was to shut down all federal funding for cancer cure research. And it's still mostly shut down. Have you ever known anyone with cancer?
I talked to NIH officials, current and former, about what's been happening inside the agency since the Trump administration shut down their grantmaking pipeline in January. Their stories showed just how willing our new leaders are to break the law: www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...
This is horrifying and should be read by anyone who thinks we can just wait and things at NIH will go back to normal. NIH leadership currently breaking the law in defiance of judges orders and their own lawyers' advice. Cranks like Memoli and Bhattacharya are only going to make the situation worse.
