NIH is not issuing awards. You may think that it's because they it is coming up with new directions of research...The apposite is true.
Here is a graph showing how many fewer new funding opportunities that NIH has posted over time.
-91%, a trend that started on Jan 2025.
Life Science Editors wrote a really great "Snippet" about our recent paper describing PDAR. @lifescienceeditors.bsky.social @cp-cell.bsky.social
Why cells die without Pol II www.lifescienceeditors.com/2025/11/15/w...
RFK Jr. has a less-than-zero understanding of how science works. "Make the proof" should be disturbing for anybody who cares about health, truth, or democracy.
Join our fight to impeach RFK Jr. here 👉 www.standupforscience.net/quack-o-gram...
#impeachrfk #impeachthequack
🚨 BREAKING: James Comey posts a video statement following his indictment
"My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump...But I'm not afraid. And I hope you're not either...And I'm innocent. So let's have a trial and keep the faith."
We used machine-learning tools in an attempt to recreate the method for cutting funding, and then applied it to past US NIH grants to reveal the broad-reaching consequences
go.nature.com/4pBArFH
NEW: Nature trained AI to predict which NIH grants from 2014 would have been cut if the Trump admin had its way back then — and what science would have been lost to history.
"The results show the damage that cuts in funding can do to research, and the unpredictable nature of the research process."
Picture of Nick Harper, a graduate student in the Lee Lab at UMass Chan Medical School
A nice Q&A with Nick Harper about the discovery of PDAR, and his road to becoming a scientist @umasschan.bsky.social
www.umassmed.edu/dsb/dsb-comm...
Congrats to Nick Harper and the rest of the team!
7/end 🧪
A 3rd surprise: PDAR accounts for the activity of many cancer drugs, including several that have never been considered transcriptional inhibitors.
Drugs that cause bulky DNA lesions activate many stress pathways… but activating PDAR accounts for their ability to kill cancer cells.
6/n 🧪
The 2nd surprise is related to how PDAR works: cells sense the loss of the hypo-phosphorylated (i.e., not actively transcribing) forms of RNA Pol II.
Yes, this is about loss of gene expression, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with loss of transcriptional activity or loss of RNA 😳
5/n 🧪
With activation of PDAR, cells die proactively. This occurs before cells really experience any stress from the dysregulated gene expression, and the outcome isn’t left to chance.
4/n 🧪
The 1st surprise is simply that PDAR exists.
Intuitively, complete loss of gene expression should be sufficient to kill a cell… and that is true, but it takes a LOOONG time and cells die using an array of different mechanisms (e.g., inflammatory/necrotic, apoptotic, etc.).
3/n 🧪
The image shows the pathway called the Pol II Degradation-dependent Apoptotic Response (PDAR), highlighting the 3 mechanistic steps leading to cell death: Pol II degradation, PTBP1 and BCL2L12 translocation, and activation of cell intrinsic apoptosis
We call this pathway the Pol II Degradation-dependent Apoptotic Response (PDAR).
Our study highlights 3 major surprises about PDAR:
2/n 🧪
I’m excited to highlight our latest paper, just published in Cell 🎉
We report the existence of a previously uncharacterized signaling pathway that is responsible for activating cell death upon loss of gene expression.
1/n 🧪
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
For who still thinks this can’t happen here… it’s already happening.
www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...
awesome work Steve and team!
"[A] sleeper issue is the proposed 40 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health, in the White House’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year."
Perhaps injecting some economic impact data may help awaken what should not be a sleeper issue... @prospect.org
scienceimpacts.org/fy26
The Lee Lab at Paint Nite at Nu Kitchen in Worcester, MA
Things have been challenging over these last few months, but we also had a lot to celebrate...
Tiana and Mika joining the lab 🎉,
Kelly passing her QE 🎉,
Gavin publishing a paper and submitting another 🎉,
Megan publishing a paper 🎉,
Nick getting excellent reviews 🎉
...so we did a paint nite.
Trump’s new ‘gold standard’ rule will destroy American science as we know it" by Colette Delawalla (@cdelawalla.bsky.social), Victor Ambros, Carl Bergstrom, Carol Greider, Michael Mann and Brian Nosek for @theguardian.com: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Not that anyone asked, but during my tenure on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, under part of Obama-2 and all of Trump-1, we visited Military Bases domestically & abroad.
At no time did any member of the Armed Forces I met say to me: “America needs less science funding.”
Grants on antibiotic resistance (and many other things) cancelled "due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students."
Every single Jewish org needs to stand up and speak clearly against this weaponization of antisemitism
"People should not take medical advice from me" ~ the man directly in charge of medical advice for the United States
Set aside the headline, this is a good primer on the how the federal govt wanted higher Ed to take on a bigger research role, and funded the infrastructure to make that possible via merit-based peer reviewed processes. The research funding is not entitlements and cutting it comes w real costs
Yyyyyyeeeeessssssa!!!! We are finally standing up!!!!!!!!!!!!
Harvard steps up
www.harvard.edu/research-fun...
What we saw today was two jumped up thugs and their bootlicking sychophants laughing at the US Constitution, the supreme court, and the idea that anyone can stop them from doing anything they want www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...
🔥 @ninajankowicz.com: "Mr Taibbi said when he was first searching through the so-called Twitter files he didn't know what he was looking at. Well, he still doesn't. Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works."
