Bobby D

@GillibertLuc @suzania Right. So now thanks to Palantir, it's used tamely, as it was meant to be.

@suzania Ontology was already wildly used in computer science in the 90s...

@suzania Oncology, a term popularized by Palantir spinoff Palancir, is finally gaining recognition...

@Mylovanov Thank you for posting this. It is shocking that Putin has just been allowed to destroy Ukraine.

Thank you for reading this post! Please also consider donating to support Ukrainian students who study during the war if this cause resonates with you. foundation.kse.ua/en/donate-to-e…

Russians said: ‘Now we’ll lay you on the table, cut off your arms and legs, and throw it out for dogs. And that will be the end of you.’ Mykola, Ukrainian, about Russian captivity: They beat every part of my body. With batons. Broke two ribs. Hit my arms. 1/

@rob_freeman @NikoMcCarty @matthewcobb You have this backwards. It was Watson and Crick who robbed Franklin. "We were not aware of the details of the results presented there when we devised our structure" = "we can't admit Wilkins showed us the X-ray that Pauling took while working with Franklin."

@NikoMcCarty @matthewcobb I had just revisited this story. In particular this article, which I see is by Matthew Cobb. I didn't read it as Photo 51 having no impact, but agree that portraying Franklin as a victim, robs her of her true credit in a joint effort of many people. nature.com/articles/d4158…

I've been reading @matthewcobb's new biography on Francis Crick. It contains many surprises, especially regarding the solving of DNA's structure. I finished reading through 1953. Here my notes so far: 1. Photograph 51 was not taken by Rosalind Franklin. It was taken by Raymond Gosling, a PhD student working with Franklin, in May 1952. 2. Also, Photograph 51 played no role in Watson/Crick's model. Writhes Cobb: "Crick did not see the photo until weeks after they had discovered the structure, nor did it provide Watson with any new information beyond a very rough idea of the itensity distribution [of the x-ray crystallography data.]" Franklin's real contribution to the structure, and an idea which she discussed as early as 1951, was instead that the crystalline form of DNA was "a face-centred monoclinic unit cell with the C-axis parallel to the fibre axis." In other words, her crystallography data showed that there were two strands in DNA, and that those strands ran antiparallel with the bases inside. Again, she publicly disclosed this in a 1951 lecture, but apparently all Watson could recall about that lecture was Franklin's appearance, as he later described in his book. 3. It's widely thought that Watson and Crick, after building their model, walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and told "everyone within hearing distance that [they] had found the secret of life." This came from Watson's book, The Double Helix, but it is entirely made up. Crick said it did not happen, and Watson admitted the same in 2016. 4. Around the same time that Max Perutz was trying to solve a protein structure for the first time, a researcher in New York named David Harker received a $1 million grant to try to become the first instead. This is surprising for two reasons: a) I had never heard of Harker and b) $1 million was a HUGE sum at the time; a typical house in England cost ~$1,800 at the time. TL;DR The best-funded labs do not always get the spoils. 5. Between 1947 and 1949, "nearly two hundred papers were published on DNA." This at a time when papers were much less frequent than they are now. This was surprising because the structure, let alone proof that DNA was the genetic material, did not come until many years later! The lesson, of course, is that just because a field seems "hot" does not mean you should not work on it; the big discovery may still be there for the taking. 6. Freeman Dyson warned Crick against migrating from physics into biology. "If you switch to biology now, you will be too old to do the exciting stuff when biology finally takes off," Dyson told him. 7. Watson and Crick (and many other molecular biologists who came from physics) explicitly said they decided to pivot into biology after reading Schrodinger's small book, "What is Life?" In short, writing can have a huge influence on the trajectory or invention of scientific fields. I recommend reading this book. My short social media posts cannot do the story justice.

@NikoMcCarty @matthewcobb Watson, who was there, completely contradicts Cobb in this interview (go to 1:02:45). The X-ray told them that "it had to be a helix. I went wild when I saw it." youtube.com/watch?v=A0kfjD…

@Valen10Francois No Y-axis, no credibility.

Americans have a unique superpower: They naturally know how to dig entrenched political cleavages overnight to stick to their political tribe. Even on issues where they previously didn't disagree much! Some samples of America's hyper-tribalism

@MitoPsychoBio But seriously, what part is incorrect? The thread is confusing.

@MitoPsychoBio If you think of our species as just another way to propagate mitochondria, perhaps it is we who move around them.

Correct - not how mitochondrial motility works

@strnr There's no such thing as a UMAP plot. Those are scatterplots.

CompBioAgent: an LLM-powered agent for single-cell RNA-seq data exploration biorxiv.org/content/10.110… 🧬🖥️🧪 github.com/interactiverep…

@tylerblack32 It's, er, curious in a different way in French, with the second part of the sentence in a smaller font. They deserve points for creativity.

Axe the sales! Tax on homes! Brilliant campaign

@Sanbomics UMAP doesn't make abominable figures if you give it all the data. Why do you attribute to UMAP dimensionality reduction that is primarily based on PCA?

Senescent cells contribute to disease and are found in many tissues but are hard to analyze because markers have been derived in culture and do not account for cell-type differences. Here, we define new signatures based on millions of single cells (1/5) nature.com/articles/s4146…

@OxygenIvan @addictedtoigno1 The best place to start is the very last plot. Everybody at Nature knows this: CDKN2B is the most well-known passenger gene. I found this thanks to @addictedtoigno1 and @LeonidSchneide1. I wrote a formal manuscript and sent a complaint to ORI after an exchange with Leonid.

@BobbyDaretti @addictedtoigno1 I’ll look it up closely and post here

#1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">pubpeer.com/publications/D… In 2025 it is utterly unacceptable for journals (let alone a major one) to avoid doing what Sholto David @addictedtoigno1 does unpaid. It is also unacceptable that they keep accepting manuscripts from someone with a long list of problematic figures! @Thatsregrettab1 @DrLizaMD

@DrinkSolaPop This photo brings back one of my fondest memories: first time I ever heard The Clash, listening to the radio at the Sheepshead Bay station in Brooklyn. Also, my mother checking if the spray paint was dry before sitting down. Thank you.

Prospect Heights, Brooklyn (1982). The Franklin Ave Shuttle heading toward Fulton Street. Photographed by Steve Zabel.

@StevenSalzberg1 @Nature If you think that was bad, wait until you see the absurd plots that @Nature published as a favor to Bob Weinberg. They helped him fabricate a realm of research for his disciple out of thin air, in the supplements. (I reported this to ORI.) #4" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">pubpeer.com/publications/3…

@BobbyDaretti holy s%#$, I didn't realize they claim "no competing interests." That's simply a lie. They run a company that is commercializing this result, and the company is listed as their primary affiliation. WTF, @nature?

I'm very skeptical of this: RNA editing markers detected with RNA-seq can tell the difference between depression and bipolar disorder? Good that it's a published result, but the authors also own the company that sells the new test

@ejustin46 People are refusing vaccines, not hesitating. In passing, "hesitancy" is not a real word.

“People will not even bring out their children to be immunised, because of the corona vaccine”: fake news, misinformation, vaccine hesitancy and the role of community engagement in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance in Southern Ghana buff.ly/4iYb2mf

@FilipGarbicz He seems to be saying "you've never seen an issue like this." Must not be a native English speaker. H1B should really do better at screening applicants.

This person has a sit at the WH.

@davidmcswane Sorry - I thought your job was to inform the public.

@BobbyDaretti My job is to publish stuff 🤷🏻‍♂️

Let me tell you a story – one of the more haunting I’ve seen in 20 years of journalism. It’s about greed, death and denial. It took two years to unravel one doctor’s myth, a hospital’s complicity in creating it, and a documented trail of suspicious deaths… 🧵

@davidmcswane You negated something I didn't state. If the only plot linked to the story is partially illegible, why post it in the first place?

@BobbyDaretti There’s no rule that we must publish all of our records, but this one happens to be linked to in the story.

@yourheartdoc1 If you don't name names, you're wasting everybody's time and it doesn't matter if your story is fact or fiction. Venting on Twitter accomplishes nothing. That's all you've done so far. Shaming companies on Twitter takes courage.

Spending an hour on hold each time. Finally on the third day got through. Phone call scheduled several days later where I imagine it'll ultimately get denied anyway. This is American healthcare.

Trying to get a prior authorization approved for a patient of mine who needs a cardiac procedure. Initially not approved , submitted more info, a week later still not approved and requested a peer to peer (phone call w insurance doctor) my staff called three times... (1/2)