Liliana E. Lucca

"Data will be shared upon reasonable request"

I think we are in the heroin-as-a-cough-syrup phase with technology and AI for kids. Hopefully there will be a huge U-turn in the near future.

Kindergarten???? Luckily I still live in the past where the only screens that they see in school at 5-6 yo is the occasional educational movie about some animals or an educational show to learn a second or third language. On a good-old tv.

The Grant Cycle Link to phdcomics.com

Another version of the grant cycle: start draft with ample margins, Arial 12, 1.5 line spacing -> worry that you don't have enough to say -> realize that you can't write concisely -> narrow margins, Arial 10.8, 1 line spacing phdcomics.com/comics/archi...

Love this, but mutate() HAD to be yassify()

De novo-designed pMHC binders facilitate T cell–mediated cytotoxicity toward cancer cells The recognition of intracellular antigens by CD8+ T cells through T cell receptors (TCRs) is central for adaptive immunity against infections and cancer. However, the identification of TCRs from patie...

Non-TCR TCR-T cells! 👇
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Advice for grant season: don't save all the glitter for the last Aim. I once had a grant rejected because one reviewer clearly did not read through both aims of a two-aim grant ˆˆ.. or maybe was it because I didn't respect the grant holy trinity and didn't write a third aim?

Insane! I mean, Tuesday is the day when many people feel the most productive, so maybe Editors are putting more effort into pre-screening papers that deserve being sent out for reviewing?

If everything Rob Pike created vanished overnight, the Internet would stop working. If everything AI created vanished overnight, we’d all breathe a huge sigh of relief and get on with our lives.

Excited that our work on the impact of immunotherapy with bispecific antibodies in multiple myeloma will be presented at #ASH2025 by Ludovic Martinet. Tune in on the 8th and enjoy a thorough look into the destiny of T cells over treatment and across tissues! submit.hematology.org/program/pres...

q.e.d. would never!!

Very happy to see that @stackoverflow.com.web.brid.gy has a feature of copying with attribution: when you paste someone's code into yours, it comes with comments specifying the source, the author's name, the date of retrieval and the type of license. I hadn't noticed that before!

by the way, I do have an AI installed (grammarly), which I used once for a lay abstract, and now it just slides into everything I write. It wanted me to change "innocuous" for "wrong", hence completely changing the meaning of my post. Nice try, sweetie, nice try.

There is nothing innocuous with routinely using AI for help with structuring your (your?) thoughts. The most important moments of your career will be oral exchanges: job talks, interviews, questions at meetings. You'll have to make an argument on the spot, prompted by a human. Learn how to do that.

YES! I owe the success of a recent application to having imposed this rule on myself. Sometimes we think that we need to "game the system" and cram as many words as possible within the allotted limits, but we really need to make our writing palatable to a tired reviewer who reading it on an airplane

Active form over passive form as much as possible

experience and confidence to come up with bold ideas (like the dish soap protocol!). When I was at Yale, most technical help came from post-grads who stayed just for 2 years. In France there used to be a lot of good positions with stable contracts for these profiles, but that's not so true anymore..

I wholehartedly agree, but do you find that having ingenious and rigorous publication-worthy protocols requires a certain lab structure? I feel that research scientists with stable contracts are key to that. They embody the living memory of the lab technological savoir faire, they have the (cont'd)

ChatGPT always asking you of they can help you with another, loosely-related question at the end of a productive interaction is the equivalent of MacDonald's employees always asking you if you wanted to supersize your order.. ad we saw how well that went.

Thanks for all you do to put out tools that make flow cytometry better for the whole community. I've seen enough of those kraken-like plots to start thinking that spectral flow cytometry is just faux cytometry when it comes to three-way cocultures, but now I look forward to trying your pipeline!

Surely we don't have to imagine - there must be studies analyzing the demographics of Covid vaccine forgoers that can be cited. As for your second point, are you suggesting that those people died / fared worse from Covid and not from cancer? Did they discuss Covid infection as a covariate?

As for your point about people refusing the Covid vaccine being generally skeptical about medicine and in worse health, what are you basing it on? Especially in Texas, where the local politicians might have made vaccine refusal not exactly a fringe position..

Interesting points, but in Fig 5k they do analyze OS exclusively in patients that started ICI in the pandemic era (starting on 9/1/2020, 100 days before vaccine approval). And they still see the claimed effect.

SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines sensitize tumours to immune checkpoint blockade - Nature mRNA vaccines targeting SARS-CoV-2 also sensitize tumours to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Kudos to @adamgrippin.bsky.social and colleagues on this exciting work on how the Covid mRNA vaccine - the one that we all got - strengthens the effect of checkpoint blockade immunotherapy in solid tumors. If only mRNA vaccine research was not under attack.. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking for a PhD or a post-doc position? Here is a litmus test for you: ask the PI who writes 75% of most papers that come out of their lab. If the answer is them, start singing "Thank you, next, next" and leave.

An image with a black and white background and a Latin American immigrant and a title Schröinger's Immigrant. On the left, it reads, "Lazily collecting all the welfare." On the right, it reads, "But also somehow taking all the jobs."