Aaron Storey

Essay from Susan Lindquist: molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/mb…

I’m out. I can’t support a platform intended to misinform and mislead the masses. See you in a better space. m.youtube.com/watch?v=QDydKw…

Anti-slit diaphragm antibodies in autoimmune podocytopathy: •Anti-nephrin → frequent in kids •Anti-podocin → in kids & adults •Anti-Kirrel1 → more rare •Some patients have multiple autoantibodies. journals.lww.com/jasn/citation/…

Our new study reporting anti-slit autoantibodies against podocin and Kirrel1 in a subset of patients with nephrotic syndrome is out in JASN journals.lww.com/jasn/citation/…

I come from a family of doctors & cancer researchers. My district is full of medical professionals. RFK, Jr. is an anti-vax conspiracist. While we hear from him today, here’s the facts on what he did to kids in Samoa & why the Senate must reject him:

I don't know why so many Americans have this idea that Germans all feel guilty about WWII. I don't know anyone my generation or even my parents' generation who feels this way. I think this is a story that Americans are telling themselves. What is true is that at least the Germans I know feel a responsibility to make sure what happened in Nazi Germany doesn't happen again, not here, and not anywhere else. I certainly do. This is why we are scared by what we see happening in the United States. The concentration of power, the streamlining of opinions, the normalization of evil, and the populism to excuse it. These are all warning signs we were taught to recognize. Americans have this idea that the Holocaust happened in Germany because something is especially wrong with Germans. We're just somehow especially evil. This is why the bad guys in Hollywood movies are always Germans. This is why they make jokes about our supposedly military sounding language. I strongly disagree. What happened in Germany could have happened anywhere. It's just that Hitler was the first to exploit this weakness. He was a master of mass manipulation (probably strongly influenced by Le Bon's "The Crowd" -- worth a read if you don't know it). Now we have new masters of mass manipulation. And of course Germans worry about it. Don't confuse what we feel is our responsibility with guilt. Yes, ugh, "responsibility". That sounds terribly German, doesn't it. I'm sure you read this wiz a Schermen eksent. No, I'm not proud to be German. Why would I? I didn't do anything for it, I just happen to have been born to two Germans. But I am glad I am German because all things considered it's a good country. But if it was possible to just identify as Earthling and not belong to any country, that's what I'd want to be.

Looks like NIH grant review panels have been suspended temporarily. Because it takes time to coordinate and schedule a multi-layered grant panel review from experts across the country, what seems like a short delay in review of funding applications could be the difference between survival and shuttering for many valuable research efforts. I started my academic research lab a year before the erratic first Trump presidency and vividly remember the uncertainty of those times. The folks starting their labs now during second term are facing similar challenges. The situation is even more precarious for more established labs that don’t have stable university startup funds remaining and require external funding to continue to pay students, postdocs, & research staff to stay open. This situation highlights that diversification of funding sources for science is good, including for the basic science that sparks so much innovation. This could mean broadening research efforts in other sectors (private for-profit or non-profit R&D). The NIH may be the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world but over-dependence on a single sector so sensitive to political winds is bad. We need nuance and creativity in how to generate value that ensures science-driven progress. Many of us in the private sector are thinking about how to grow the pie and sustain research efforts. Our scientific ecosystem needs to be much more resilient. If you’re an academic researcher worried about your fate, there is a pretty big world out there and a lot of ways to contribute your scientific expertise to advance solutions for humanity. You can invent them too. And if you’re a private entity, you can start to decrease dependence on publicly funded academic research for upstream discovery by expanding impactful basic science activities strategically and sharing more of the outputs openly. Hope this message of agency resonates with those searching for solutions and a place for their energy.

The membrane attack complex drives thrombotic microangiopathy in complement mediated atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome. kidney-international.org/article/S0085-…

It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.

A platform for the continuous selection of protein aggregation inhibitors from genetically encoded cyclic peptide libraries in E. coli is developed, here used to develop inhibitors against amyloid-β42 and human islet amyloid polypeptide aggregation nature.com/articles/s4158…

This pretty much settles it: we're entering the era of low-cost, on-demand binders for everything Excited to see what people build now that "inject a llama with some junk and bleed it a month later" is no longer the cutting-edge tech nature.com/articles/s4158…

Every second, trillions of flowing cells transporting oxygen to your respiring mitochondria The blood is the bridge between breath and flowing electrons in your mitochondria So beautiful !

“How a neuroscientist solved the mystery of his own long COVID” “More tests revealed the identity of the antibody causing Jeff’s symptoms: an antibody that binds to neurofascin 155…” youcanknowthings.com/how-one-neuros…

5,562 proteins were found to have tissue-specific enrichment across 32 human tissues. ◼️ The majority of them (3,088) are enriched at the protein but not RNA level. 🧠 The brain hosts the largest number of proteins that are only enriched at the protein level but not RNA level.

The Aizawa Attractor. A simple equation, but beautiful chaotic pattern. [bityl.co/Nh9d]

There's still no better explainer of what neural networks are and how they work than @3blue1brown's 8-video playlist. He recently added four new videos to this playlist: 1. Large Language Models explained briefly 2. Transformers (how LLMs work) explained visually 3. Attention in transformers, visually explained 4. How might LLMs store facts If you are interested in AI, I can't recommend these videos enough.

It was spring 2020. I was a professor and had recently learned I’d successfully been awarded early tenure. At the tail end of a series of talks at other universities, a colleague had invited me to give a seminar at a stellar department that was an unusually great fit for my research - they were interested in recruiting me there. I was about to fly there a second time with my husband to more carefully consider moving my lab, husband, and then-6yo son to a place they’d never been. Two days before our trip, COVID shut down the country. I remember thinking, “am I really going to leave my perfect stable life where my family is happy…to move to a place I know so little about, to a house sight unseen, to a department I just visited for the first time ever?” The thing I remember most clearly from that time is the email I wrote to my new department chair. I said that every time I wonder if I’m crazy to take this leap, I remember how my parents moved to this country when I was 5 and my sister was 7. They left a comfortable life to a place where none of their professional credentials were recognized. My dad was the chief engineer on an oil tanker and retrained here as a software engineer, rose up in the ranks, and became senior manager in a lucrative tech company. My mom was a dentist who had to repeat 4 years of dental school entirely over in the states so she could do the work she already had infinitely more professional experience in than her classmates. Due to exchange rates and fees, any money set aside was decimated, and they started basically from scratch as they built up the skills to build a new life. All for the promise of uncapped potential for their kids. The decision I was grappling with in the aggressive safety of my life was a drop in the bucket of the leap of faith my fearless parents took for their kids. So when offered the position, I told my new department chair that by comparison, this felt easy - I accepted the offer without reservation. While I didn’t stay there long, I soon co-founded a company that employs even more people than my academic lab did, working on some of the most important problems at the leading edge of biotechnology. I feel so fortunate this country welcomes intellectuals and founders but also all those whose potential we cannot predict to create what we cannot imagine. America is the promise of what is not yet realized. Built by those who are not yet famous. The unique mix of creativity and talent and ambition and fearlessness from every corner of the world. It’s such a humbling and awe-inspiring idea we have the opportunity to fight for.

Urine complement-related proteins in IgAN and IgAVN, possible biomarkers of disease activity: ▫️U-PTX-3 and u-MBL might be biomarkers of an active proliferative stage of the disease ▫️↑ u-C4c indicate more chronic lesions in both IgAN and IgAVN 🔗doi.org/10.1093/ckj/sf…

Entropy is one of those formulas that many of us learn, swallow whole, and even use regularly without really understanding. (E.g., where does that “log” come from? Are there other possible formulas?) Yet there's an intuitive & almost inevitable way to arrive at this expression.

"One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority.' Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else." — The Demon-Haunted World

@J_my_sci @neely615 Getting this on YouTube so you don't need to login to listen to it was way more complex than it needed to be, but I did it :) youtu.be/bgoRtiwgObY