It’s been a heavy grading day, but at least I can say I’ve got one of my three classes done, and it was the largest one. Can I get the other two done tomorrow? Before I go to the local humane society fundraiser in the evening? Yes, I will. It shall be done.
The NIH is headquartered on this sprawling 300-acre campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It’s home to the largest clinical research hospital in the world, and 27 research institutes and centers.
The “leaked” budget draft includes a plan to consolidate those 27 institutes and centers into eight and eliminate four, including the Institutes on Nursing Research and Minority Health.
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But Collins says the bulk of that budget, more than 80%, goes to researchers off campus.Dr. Francis Collins: Most of that goes out to the universities and institutes all over the country. They’re the ones that do the work, but they get the funds from NIH by writing very compelling grant applications that go through the most rigorous peer review system in the world.
Some of those researchers’ work lines America’s medicine cabinets, such as statins, antidepressants, and new forms of insulin.
A Journal of the American Medical Association study found that between 2010 and 2019, 99% of FDA-approved drugs had ties to research funded by the NIH.
Dr. Francis Collins: Every dollar that NIH gave out in 2024 to a grant is estimated to have returned $2.46 just in a year. That’s a pretty darn good return on investment.
I was careful to use the past tense up there, because right now it’s being rapidly dismembered, dismantled, and disemboweled, in a savage act of intentional vandalism. This is like Egypt blowing up the pyramids, or Italy bulldozing the Vatican, or France deciding the Louvre would be a great storage facility for outflow from a sewage treatment plant. If America were to be remembered by history for one great accomplishment, it would be the scientific productivity established here, and an institution modeled by other countries around the world. And it’s being willfully destroyed by a gang of incompetent know-nothings.
NIH insider: I’ve never seen the morale of an institution or any place change so abruptly to where we feel fear.
It began, he says, in February, when more than a thousand probationary employees were placed on leave.
Sharyn Alfonsi: When that happened, that first hit, what was the reaction, like immediately and in the office the next Monday?
NIH insider: Tears. Everybody trying to assess damage, who’s been fired, who hasn’t been fired, what do we do? And then an immediate sort of assessment– in the clinical center: “Okay, can we still take care of patients and our research participants? Is it still safe?”
Sharyn Alfonsi: No one thought before they fired the people that dealt with the patients that maybe they shouldn’t be fired?
NIH insider: This didn’t come from within NIH, it came from outside, they don’t know what these people do.
As DOGE dismantled parts of the agency, employees told us work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.
Imagine the burning of the library of Alexandria — we will look back on this moment as something entirely equivalent. This is not something you can rebuild in a few years with a supportive congress and a bunch of money. Those people are leaving. They’re emigrating or looking for career alternatives. They’re knee-capping universities.
NIH insider: This doesn’t feel like a strategic plan to reorganize and make the NIH better and more efficient. It feels like a wrecking ball.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Typically, when a company has layoffs they talk about restructuring. There’ll be a new structure and this is how it’s gonna work. Is there a structure in place right now for the NIH?
NIH insider: Not that anybody’s shared. We have no idea. You know making the organization better, everybody is for that . There is no question. But again– this is not more efficient. It is infinitely less efficient right now because you can’t get anything done.
The confusion in Bethesda has also paralyzed many of the 2,500 universities and institutes that rely on the NIH to help fund their research.
So far, nearly 800 grants have been terminated- some on HIV and AIDS, trans health and COVID-19 after researchers were told their work was no longer an agency priority.
And last week, the NIH signaled that more cuts could be coming. It announced that any university with a DEI program or that boycotts an Israeli company might not be awarded new NIH grants for medical research and that existing grants could be terminated.
It’s catastrophic. And what’s amazing is that we can pin it directly on one man, Donald Trump, who has put vandals and morons in charge of what should be America’s pride. In particular, he’s put Rat FucKer jr in charge of HHS, which oversees the NIH. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and what he thinks he knows is all wrong.
If you need a little humor (I don’t, I think it’s time to seriously charge forward and battle these assholes) to stomach the bad news, here’s John Oliver. The best bit in this segment where RatFucker jr just confidently and stupidly makes up figures, claiming, for instance, that 50% of the people in China are diabetic. Nothing the RatFucker says can be trusted — he’s a liar, a con man, and a snake oil salesman.
The conclusion is also good.
Secretary Kennedy is a danger to the public’s health and should resign or be fired.
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RFK needs to go and by impeachment if necessary.
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This is a man who is clearly in way over his worm-riddled head. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t know who he’s fired, he doesn’t even know how many diabetic people there are in China. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s currently spreading dangerous nonsense and gutting life-saving research all while bringing in a basement quack.
Yeah. But by impeachment? Congress approved RFK jr’s appointment, despite knowing everything that Oliver pointed out, so who believes we can trust them to act responsibly now?
Good question.
Does your cat’s butthole really touch all the surfaces in your home?
I’m impressed. It’s an original idea, executed simply, and that’s what I like to see in a science fair question. It’s simple but a little bit icky: he put lipstick on a cat’s butthole and had it sit down on various substrates and asked if it left a mark. I hate to call it “elegant,” but yeah, that’s elegant.
I know you all want to know the answer:
His results and general findings: Long and medium haired cat’s buttholes made NO contact with soft or hard surfaces at all. Short haired cats made NO contact on hard surfaces. But we did see evidence of a slight smear on the soft bedding surface. Conclusion, if you have a short haired cat and they may be lying on a pile of laundry, an unmade bed, or other soft uneven surface, then their butthole MAY touch those surfaces!
Our evil cat is a shorthair, wouldn’t you know it.
I don’t care, because most people’s understanding of IQ is ill-founded and wrong.
All the belligerent guys online who insist they have a high IQ? I suspect many of them haven’t actually taken an IQ test at all.
Not a proper one, anyway. Official IQ tests, whatever their limitations, are highly-refined scientific tools. They take a lot of time, and cost a fair amount of money.
Basically, I would be beyond amazed if actual IQ tests, and all they involve, have become so widely accessible that @BigNutzz32998762 on Twitter/X and his countless peers who brag about their 178 IQ have been genuinely, properly assessed.
Also, given how IQ actually works, if countless random people were scoring ridiculously high on real IQ tests, wouldn’t they have to recalibrate the underlying assumptions, to keep the average as 100?
Point is, if so many people were scoring extremely high on official IQ tests, their scores would be reduced, to conform to the bell-curve. Because it’s mathematically impossible for everyone to be ‘above average’.
I haven’t taken a full, proper IQ test myself — I’ve had my IQ extrapolated from my scores on long, complex standardized tests, like the SAT and GRE. I’m not going to say what it was, because I know the limitations and fallacies of these kinds of tests, and because it was forty or fifty years ago, and my brain has been constantly changing.
The one thing I know is that people who brag about their IQ are never very intelligent.
You know what else is silly? People who declare that the conformation of your chromosomes determines your identity, your behavior, and your role in society. I know for a fact that almost no one has had their karyotype done — the exceptions are cases where there is evidence of a serious heritable anomaly — so the knowledge about chromosomes is practically negligible among the general public.
Even worse: people who have opinions on the contributions of genetics on IQ.
Forget IQ. As we all know, the proper way to score intelligence is by birthdate.
I can verify this by personal experience. I was born on 9 March, my wife was born on 10 September.
I graduated from the University of Washington, which is a major research institution, with lots of NIH money usually flowing through it. Usually. Everything changed this year.
Universities are reeling. The Trump administration has executed a flurry of research grant terminations at large, private institutions like Johns Hopkins and Princeton University. In a recent court case against NIH, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the administration targeted cuts to grants about topics it disfavors like diversity, LGBTQ issues and gender identity.
Among public universities, the University of Washington is one of the hardest hit, and researchers and students have said the fallout from the cuts has upended their careers and forced some to consider leaving the U.S.
“We’re going to have a big brain drain in the U.S. of these really talented folks,” said Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, the vice dean of research and graduate education at UW Medicine. “It’s not just a switch that you flip, right? If people move out into another direction with their careers, they often don’t come back.”
In a statement to NBC News, NIH said it was dedicated to restoring “gold-standard, evidence-based science.”
That last bit sounds like something Jay Bhattacharya would say, and it’s a lie. We had “gold-standard, evidence-based science” before the fringe pseudoscience kooks took over, and whatever it is they’re restoring, it isn’t evidence-based science.
Several institutions out there around Puget Sound are important centers of Alzheimer’s research — I guess that disease doesn’t fall under MAHA’s list of good research, which mainly seems to center on denying vaccines and peddling pointless supplements and killing the scientific establishment.
“Many of us are in the same boat” as the University of Washington, said Dr. Helena Chui, the principal investigator at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the University of Southern California. “It’s a very strong network, and it would be easy to wreck, but it took years to build.”
All this destruction in the name of making the government more “efficient” and reducing deficits, all while the Trump administration is burning money at a furious rate.
A Wall Street Journal analysis of daily financial statements issued by the Treasury Department found that government spending since the inauguration in January is $154 billion more than in the same period in 2024 during the Biden administration.
I have to ask where that $154 billion went…
I’m a little bit panicky — the semester is almost over. There’s three weeks left, but two of those are committed to an exam and student presentations, so I’ve only got ONE WEEK to cover mitochondrial inheritance and epigenetics. I’m resigned to the fact that I can only give an introduction to those topics, but otherwise, sure, would all the students like to sign up for another year of genetics so I can cover everything adequately? No? You plan to graduate instead? OK.
It hurts to shut up and stop lecturing for two weeks, but I consider it essential to give students a voice. I think this quote from a terrible movie about genetics to be relevant:
You were so preoccupied with the fact that you could that you never stopped to think if you should
So all my students are going to be discussing cool things that modern science can do with genetics, and answering the question of whether we should.
And then we stop. Last day of classes is 2 May. Then I’ve got the summer free to work in the lab, and big bonus, I get a fall sabbatical (to be spent working in the lab) and don’t come back to teaching until January 2026.
I have to get through these next few weeks, though.
My genetics students are working on presentations that they’ll give at the end of the semester. One group was very enthusiastic about discussing the idea of Pleistocene rewilding, the idea that we should resurrect extinct species and turn them loose on the Dakotas, and the most dramatic species to de-extinctify was the Wooly Mammoth. Colossal Biosciences is claiming to work on exactly that, although, honestly, I think Colossal is nothing but a hype factory.
Now, though, Colossal has announced that they have successfully resurrected on extinct species, the dire wolf. But have they, really? I don’t think so.
Modern gray wolves are not descended from dire wolves, but that’s the stock they started from. They made a piddling 20 gene edits to a mere 14 genes (that’s a bit unfair, that really is a good technical accomplishment), which is not sufficient to turn a wolf into a completely different species. What they’ve really done is made a mutant wolf and claimed it is a dire wolf.
That’s just as well, because there is no modern habitat to support a dire wolf population — if they had successfully reconstructed the full dire wolf genome, and successfully inserted that into a wolf surrogate, George Church wouldn’t be snuggling up with a cute puppy, and they wouldn’t have a place to release them, and since even modern wolves struggle to survive in the modern world, it would be a population doomed to rapid extinction. I don’t think even Canadians would be nice enough to not take them out with a hunting rifle or a trap.
Further to my argument that it’s all hype, they had to sequence more of the dire wolf genome, since what was known was inadequate, and they’re in the process of publishing that sequence. George R.R. Martin is one of the authors. You know he had nothing to do with the work, so that is just a PR stunt. The wolf puppies are spectacularly white, which was probably not true of the ancient dire wolf…they specifically deleted two pigmentation genes, a trait not present in the dire wolf genome, to get that cosmetic feature.
I asked my students who are researching the idea of Pleistocene rewilding exactly what they would do with woolly mammoths if they could resurrect them. Their answers: build a kind of glorified zoo, like Jurassic Park, but this would have to be a zoo without any ecological/environmental purpose, and I doubt that zoos have the kind of profitability that would allow them to spend tens of millions of dollars to get a single animal that would also have unknown induced genetic disorders. The fall back position was a safari game park, where billionaires could get their jollies gunning down hulking great mammoths to get a unique trophy.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that after the revolution, the billionaires will be extinct, too.
As everyone knows, it’s all about the size of the palps
The creationists (and a few scientists) are unhappy that there isn’t a simple, single, concrete factor to differentiate the sexes. They looked to the scientists, and were not satisfied with the answer.
at its annual meeting in 2023, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) canceled a session that aimed to explore biological sex as an analytic category in anthropology. The AAA justified its decision by stating that “there is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification.”
That’s not the answer they wanted, so they turned to Georgia Purdom, the ex-molecular biologist working for Answers in Genesis to provide that single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification.
The single criterion! What will it be, you may wonder.
From a genetic standpoint, biological sex is determined by our chromosomes. I often say, “No Y, no guy.” Females typically have two X chromosomes, while males have an X and a Y chromosome. This chromosomal distinction provides a clear biological marker for sex.
The creationist has spoken.
Except…
It’s important to note that sexual development disorders do occur, and we must approach these situations with compassion. However, chromosomal analysis remains a reliable method for determining biological sex.
Except when it isn’t. She’s not keeping up with the times; all the cool kids are saying it’s all about gamete size. Or hormone titers. Or the morphology of primary or secondary sexual characteristics. Or pelvic dimensions. Or muscle mass. Or bone density.
At the very least, they ought to admit that the American Anthropological Association was correct: there is no single biological standard. And all the standards have exceptions and gray areas or ambiguities, sometimes contradict each other, or even conflict with each other. People are complicated, and anyone who claims there is a single obvious parameter that defines sexuality in such a way as to create a simple binary categorization is full of shit.
I wonder how Georgia plans to evaluate the chromosomal complement of everyone who wants to use a public restroom?
Bad news: 23andMe has gone bankrupt and is up for sale. Who knows where all that data they store is going to end up? I sent in my saliva sample years ago, they’ve got my genetic sequence on file, and I hadn’t worried about it until now, but now I am concerned. So is Rebecca Watson.
Another issue that came to light in the past few years is how can a for-profit corporation remain solvent when they make all their money on a product that, by definition, a customer can only buy once? And that’s why today, the biggest problem everyone has is that 23andMe has, in fact, declared bankruptcy. And that means that if you’re one of their customers, your genetic data might end up in the hands of someone you don’t trust.
23andMe has stated that they’ll be protecting that data throughout the bankruptcy proceedings, but people are understandably skeptical of that considering that they already gave hackers access to the data for 7 million users a few years ago, giving up user passwords and allowing the hackers to see users’ family trees.
That’s why California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a consumer alert reminding people that the Genetic Information Privacy Act and the California Consumer Privacy Act give customers the right to demand that23andMe delete all their data and even destroy any samples they might still have on file. Obviously that’s for Californians, but it’s part of the reason why customers anywhere can in fact log in and do that, and Bonta gives step by step instructions for anyone who wants to.
Here’s the steps you can take to clear your data:
To Delete Genetic Data from 23andMe:
Consumers can delete their account and personal information by taking the following steps:
Log into your 23andMe account on their website.
Go to the “Settings” section of your profile.
Scroll to a section labeled “23andMe Data” at the bottom of the page.
Click “View” next to “23andMe Data”
Download your data: If you want a copy of your genetic data for personal storage, choose the option to download it to your device before proceeding.
Scroll to the “Delete Data” section.
Click “Permanently Delete Data.”
Confirm your request: You’ll receive an email from 23andMe; follow the link in the email to confirm your deletion request.
I’ve started the process for my data. However, there is an option to first request that they email your genetic data, and yes, I clicked on that…and it’s been 3 days, and I still haven’t received it. I think I’m going to have to cancel and just go ahead and delete everything without saving a copy. This is a comment that ought to chill you right down to the nucleus of all your cells: Charles Murray wants someone to buy the company for him, or his racist friends:
Charles Murray: Okay, my billionaire friends. $23m is pocket change! And it would make me so happy.
Nope, nope, nope. I’m going to have to kill my data fast.
Hey, I don’t have any billionaire friends. What have I done right in my life?
I’ve seen this game of Telephone played out in my cell biology class, but to a greater degree.
Square units? Far too easy. Our first lab in cell biology is about observing cells and then doing a bunch of unit conversions — but we’re working with volumes and cubic units. For instance, we look at a sample of microorganisms taken from a local lake, and they calculate the density and size of cells, and have to estimate how many cells are in the lake and the volume they take up. I hate to tell you this, but our lake either contains one gigantic cell that fills the entire thing, or is a thick soup containing 10googolplex cells…mmmm, sounds tasty and nutritious.
