Mike White
@genologos.bsky.social
Associate Professor of Genetics at Washington University in St. Louis. I write about genomics at https://www.thisgenomiclife.org
Reposted by Mike White
RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory. arstechnica.com/health/2025/...
RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory
In his 2021 book vilifying Anthony Fauci, RFK Jr. lays out support for an alternate theory.
arstechnica.com
April 30, 2025 at 6:59 PM
RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory. arstechnica.com/health/2025/...
Reposted by Mike White
Whooping cough cases are rising, and doctors are bracing for another tough year. There have been 8,485 cases reported so far in 2025, according to preliminary data from the CDC. That’s twice as many cases as this time last year.
apnews.com/article/whoo...
apnews.com/article/whoo...
Whooping cough cases are rising again in the US
Preliminary data from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says the U.S. has seen 8,485 cases of whooping cough in 2025.
apnews.com
April 28, 2025 at 2:52 PM
Whooping cough cases are rising, and doctors are bracing for another tough year. There have been 8,485 cases reported so far in 2025, according to preliminary data from the CDC. That’s twice as many cases as this time last year.
apnews.com/article/whoo...
apnews.com/article/whoo...
Reposted by Mike White
Final point here: this post is from an anonymous NIH employee, and it feels critical to raise these voices precisely because the Trump administration has silenced credible NIH officials and their leadership is not representing them.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
April 28, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Final point here: this post is from an anonymous NIH employee, and it feels critical to raise these voices precisely because the Trump administration has silenced credible NIH officials and their leadership is not representing them.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
Reposted by Mike White
What can you do? Make noise.
The ask is “Leave NIH funding at last year’s (FY24) level. No DOGE cuts. No recission to codify cuts. Hands off NIH.”
If they are going to vote to cut cancer research, lets make that clear.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
The ask is “Leave NIH funding at last year’s (FY24) level. No DOGE cuts. No recission to codify cuts. Hands off NIH.”
If they are going to vote to cut cancer research, lets make that clear.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
April 28, 2025 at 2:37 PM
What can you do? Make noise.
The ask is “Leave NIH funding at last year’s (FY24) level. No DOGE cuts. No recission to codify cuts. Hands off NIH.”
If they are going to vote to cut cancer research, lets make that clear.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
The ask is “Leave NIH funding at last year’s (FY24) level. No DOGE cuts. No recission to codify cuts. Hands off NIH.”
If they are going to vote to cut cancer research, lets make that clear.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
Reposted by Mike White
New at Can We Still Govern: An anonymous NIH employee maps out the GOP budget gameplan to permanently gut our most important science agency.
Impoundment, delay and red tape will create artificial "savings" that become the new benchmark for NIH budgets.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
Impoundment, delay and red tape will create artificial "savings" that become the new benchmark for NIH budgets.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
The NIH budget is on a fast track to disaster
An NIH insider explains what Republicans are likely to do next, and what we can do
donmoynihan.substack.com
April 28, 2025 at 12:50 PM
New at Can We Still Govern: An anonymous NIH employee maps out the GOP budget gameplan to permanently gut our most important science agency.
Impoundment, delay and red tape will create artificial "savings" that become the new benchmark for NIH budgets.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
Impoundment, delay and red tape will create artificial "savings" that become the new benchmark for NIH budgets.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...
What if the reference human genome had been paywalled? Yesterday I heard genomics pioneer Bob Waterston tell of a Perkin-Elmer CEO who envisioned a pay-for-access genome that would have smothered the incredible recent progress in biotechnology.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/what-if-th...
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/what-if-th...
What if the Human Genome Project was paywalled?
In 1999 a Perkins-Elmer CEO envisioned a pay-for-access genome scheme that would have smothered two decades innovation in biotechnology and genomic medicine.
www.thisgenomiclife.org
April 25, 2025 at 6:52 PM
What if the reference human genome had been paywalled? Yesterday I heard genomics pioneer Bob Waterston tell of a Perkin-Elmer CEO who envisioned a pay-for-access genome that would have smothered the incredible recent progress in biotechnology.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/what-if-th...
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/what-if-th...
Reposted by Mike White
The notice and COMMENT PERIOD OPENED TODAY AND CLOSES MAY 23.
Anyone who would like to register an objection or comment should go to this page and click on the green “public comment” button at the top:
www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...
6/n
Anyone who would like to register an objection or comment should go to this page and click on the green “public comment” button at the top:
www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...
6/n
Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is proposing a rule to increase career employee accountability. Agency supervisors report great difficulty removing employees for poor performance or misconduc...
www.federalregister.gov
April 23, 2025 at 6:17 PM
The notice and COMMENT PERIOD OPENED TODAY AND CLOSES MAY 23.
Anyone who would like to register an objection or comment should go to this page and click on the green “public comment” button at the top:
www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...
6/n
Anyone who would like to register an objection or comment should go to this page and click on the green “public comment” button at the top:
www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...
6/n
Reposted by Mike White
Again, cancelling NSF & other federal competitive grants in higher education is massive contract breaking which undermines the most basic tenets of the rule of law & property rights in a democratic society.
👇🎯
They. Are. Breaking. Signed. Contracts. For. No. Legal. Reason.
You want to pass legislation not funding this stuff going forward? Fine. Epically idiotic, but legal.
This is something else. Shredding the basic foundations of the rule of law. Textbook authoritarianism.
They. Are. Breaking. Signed. Contracts. For. No. Legal. Reason.
You want to pass legislation not funding this stuff going forward? Fine. Epically idiotic, but legal.
This is something else. Shredding the basic foundations of the rule of law. Textbook authoritarianism.
Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants
the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever
they aren’t going into universities’ endowments
they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research
the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever
they aren’t going into universities’ endowments
they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research
April 20, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Again, cancelling NSF & other federal competitive grants in higher education is massive contract breaking which undermines the most basic tenets of the rule of law & property rights in a democratic society.
Reposted by Mike White
What if LLMs could “read” & “write” biology? 🤔
Introducing C2S‑Scale—a Yale and Google collab: we scaled LLMs (up to 27B!) to analyze & generate single‑cell data 🧬 ➡️ 📝
🔗 Blog: research.google/blog/teachin...
🔗 Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Introducing C2S‑Scale—a Yale and Google collab: we scaled LLMs (up to 27B!) to analyze & generate single‑cell data 🧬 ➡️ 📝
🔗 Blog: research.google/blog/teachin...
🔗 Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Teaching machines the language of biology: Scaling large language models for next-generation single-cell analysis
research.google
April 18, 2025 at 2:14 PM
What if LLMs could “read” & “write” biology? 🤔
Introducing C2S‑Scale—a Yale and Google collab: we scaled LLMs (up to 27B!) to analyze & generate single‑cell data 🧬 ➡️ 📝
🔗 Blog: research.google/blog/teachin...
🔗 Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Introducing C2S‑Scale—a Yale and Google collab: we scaled LLMs (up to 27B!) to analyze & generate single‑cell data 🧬 ➡️ 📝
🔗 Blog: research.google/blog/teachin...
🔗 Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Mike White
ai.stanford.edu/postdoctoral...
Postdoc candidates with strong expertise in AI for bio should apply for this new Stanford SAIL fellowship. We encourage applicants who would like to work with multiple SAIL faculty (we are part of SAIL as well). Come join us
Postdoc candidates with strong expertise in AI for bio should apply for this new Stanford SAIL fellowship. We encourage applicants who would like to work with multiple SAIL faculty (we are part of SAIL as well). Come join us
SAIL Postdoctoral Fellows – Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
ai.stanford.edu
April 18, 2025 at 5:39 PM
ai.stanford.edu/postdoctoral...
Postdoc candidates with strong expertise in AI for bio should apply for this new Stanford SAIL fellowship. We encourage applicants who would like to work with multiple SAIL faculty (we are part of SAIL as well). Come join us
Postdoc candidates with strong expertise in AI for bio should apply for this new Stanford SAIL fellowship. We encourage applicants who would like to work with multiple SAIL faculty (we are part of SAIL as well). Come join us
Reposted by Mike White
🚨I could not be more excited to share our new preprint on saturation genome editing of the small nuclear RNA (snRNA) RNU4-2:
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
A super fun collaboration with incredible duo @gregfindlay.bsky.social @joachimdejonghe.bsky.social from @crick.ac.uk
🧬🖥️🩺
🧵1/12
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
A super fun collaboration with incredible duo @gregfindlay.bsky.social @joachimdejonghe.bsky.social from @crick.ac.uk
🧬🖥️🩺
🧵1/12
Saturation genome editing of RNU4-2 reveals distinct dominant and recessive neurodevelopmental disorders
Recently, de novo variants in an 18 nucleotide region in the centre of RNU4-2 were shown to cause ReNU syndrome, a syndromic neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) that is predicted to affect tens of thous...
www.medrxiv.org
April 11, 2025 at 10:00 AM
🚨I could not be more excited to share our new preprint on saturation genome editing of the small nuclear RNA (snRNA) RNU4-2:
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
A super fun collaboration with incredible duo @gregfindlay.bsky.social @joachimdejonghe.bsky.social from @crick.ac.uk
🧬🖥️🩺
🧵1/12
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
A super fun collaboration with incredible duo @gregfindlay.bsky.social @joachimdejonghe.bsky.social from @crick.ac.uk
🧬🖥️🩺
🧵1/12
I am looking forward to spending the next year learning about 1st millennium Arabic and Islamic literature:
New podcast episode from Literature and History on Pre-Islamic Arabia available now! literatureandhistory.com/episode-111-...
April 15, 2025 at 10:32 PM
I am looking forward to spending the next year learning about 1st millennium Arabic and Islamic literature:
Drosophila biologists still going strong with the best gene names in the business:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40215271/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40215271/
April 15, 2025 at 4:41 PM
Drosophila biologists still going strong with the best gene names in the business:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40215271/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40215271/
Here's an interesting thought-instead of speculating about super-intelligent AGI, let's think about the implications of artificial intelligence as *normal* tech.
New essay from the authors of AI Snake Oil:
knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...
New essay from the authors of AI Snake Oil:
knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...
April 15, 2025 at 4:41 PM
Here's an interesting thought-instead of speculating about super-intelligent AGI, let's think about the implications of artificial intelligence as *normal* tech.
New essay from the authors of AI Snake Oil:
knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...
New essay from the authors of AI Snake Oil:
knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...
Reposted by Mike White
A very smart take on what "smarter than human AI" really means, from the inimitable @glichfield.bsky.social
"Stop trying to compare AI to humans, or to anything from the movies, and instead just keep asking: What does it actually do?" www.bloomberg.com/opinion/feat...
"Stop trying to compare AI to humans, or to anything from the movies, and instead just keep asking: What does it actually do?" www.bloomberg.com/opinion/feat...
When Will AI Be Smarter Than Humans? Don’t Ask
The term “artificial general intelligence” is being bandied about by some of tech’s smartest people, but nobody knows what it really means.
www.bloomberg.com
April 15, 2025 at 2:16 PM
A very smart take on what "smarter than human AI" really means, from the inimitable @glichfield.bsky.social
"Stop trying to compare AI to humans, or to anything from the movies, and instead just keep asking: What does it actually do?" www.bloomberg.com/opinion/feat...
"Stop trying to compare AI to humans, or to anything from the movies, and instead just keep asking: What does it actually do?" www.bloomberg.com/opinion/feat...
I tell my kids they'll need to reinvent themselves during their careers. In grad school I hadn't written code since high school and worked in a lab with only two computers. A few of us taught ourselves Perl because it seemed useful and now 40% of my work is computational.
And now it's AI:
And now it's AI:
April 13, 2025 at 10:57 PM
I tell my kids they'll need to reinvent themselves during their careers. In grad school I hadn't written code since high school and worked in a lab with only two computers. A few of us taught ourselves Perl because it seemed useful and now 40% of my work is computational.
And now it's AI:
And now it's AI:
Imagine being this family 100 years ago–4 of 8 siblings died of spinal muscular atrophy as babies. Within the past decade, we learned how to cure this disease. One of the treatments, ASOs, is being brought to bear on cancer.
April 11, 2025 at 11:23 PM
Imagine being this family 100 years ago–4 of 8 siblings died of spinal muscular atrophy as babies. Within the past decade, we learned how to cure this disease. One of the treatments, ASOs, is being brought to bear on cancer.
Some reading for the weekend:
Bad AI will be worse than p-hacking, same genes but different mutation patterns in autism and cancer, open datasets for drug development, and a couple more.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/this-weeks...
Bad AI will be worse than p-hacking, same genes but different mutation patterns in autism and cancer, open datasets for drug development, and a couple more.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/this-weeks...
This week's finds: Bad AI is bad science, autism versus cancer mutations, open drug development, etc.
For the weekend, this week's finds in genomics and more, with a science fiction recommendation.
www.thisgenomiclife.org
April 11, 2025 at 9:53 PM
Some reading for the weekend:
Bad AI will be worse than p-hacking, same genes but different mutation patterns in autism and cancer, open datasets for drug development, and a couple more.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/this-weeks...
Bad AI will be worse than p-hacking, same genes but different mutation patterns in autism and cancer, open datasets for drug development, and a couple more.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/this-weeks...
Yes, more books like this:
April 10, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Yes, more books like this:
April 9, 2025 at 11:58 PM
Reposted by Mike White
in case you're wondering, "what's the harm in claiming an extinct species has been brought back from the dead" when it most certainly has not, our interior secretary is already using it to justify taking animals off the endangered species list
April 8, 2025 at 7:59 PM
in case you're wondering, "what's the harm in claiming an extinct species has been brought back from the dead" when it most certainly has not, our interior secretary is already using it to justify taking animals off the endangered species list
Times seem rough but I'm glad we live in an era when we develop drugs by *designing* them rather hoping we'll get lucky and find a natural compound to cure a fatal disease. The era of drug design is still young & antisense oligos are an exciting part of it.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/treating-d...
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/treating-d...
April 8, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Times seem rough but I'm glad we live in an era when we develop drugs by *designing* them rather hoping we'll get lucky and find a natural compound to cure a fatal disease. The era of drug design is still young & antisense oligos are an exciting part of it.
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/treating-d...
www.thisgenomiclife.org/p/treating-d...
Reposted by Mike White
We released our preprint on the CREsted package. CREsted allows for complete modeling of cell type-specific enhancer codes from scATAC-seq data. We demonstrate CREsted’s robust functionality in various species and tissues, and in vivo validate our findings: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
April 3, 2025 at 2:30 PM
We released our preprint on the CREsted package. CREsted allows for complete modeling of cell type-specific enhancer codes from scATAC-seq data. We demonstrate CREsted’s robust functionality in various species and tissues, and in vivo validate our findings: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...