Dante Merlino MD, PhD

Twin

Researchers have been sneaking secret messages into their papers in an effort to trick AI tools into giving them a positive peer-review report Read the full story: go.nature.com/4eVTIwC

❌ CLAIM 3: "The only vaccine that has gone through placebo-controlled trials was the Covid vaccine" ✅ REALITY: One of the most misleading claims I've ever seen a government official make on national television. EVERY childhood vaccine has been tested in placebo-controlled trials. As of 6/12/25, our open-access dataset includes: 274 controlled vaccine trials (1944-2025) 3 million total participants 164 placebo-controlled trials 133 used inert placebo (no antigen, no alum) Here's proof - EVERY routine childhood vaccine antigen has been studied with a placebo of some sort: Polio (Salk 1954): Saline-controlled, 400k+ kids (PMID: 14376387) Rotavirus: 12 inert-placebo RCTs including REST trial (~70k kids) (PMID: 16394299) Hib + Diphtheria: Saline-controlled RCT (PMID: 3497990) Tetanus: Distilled water-controlled trial (PMID: 381074) Pertussis: Two no-intervention RCTs (PMIDs: 18015552, DOI: 10.2307/4583816) Pneumococcal: Multiple saline-controlled trials (PMIDs: 19483514, 15794968) MMR: 1975 trial with antigen-free diluent (PMID: 764997) HPV: Adolescent saline-controlled RCT (PMID: 17484215) Hep B: Two alum-controlled trials in newborns (PMIDs: 3903646, 6143868) Yes, even diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and varicella have been studied in placebo-controlled trials. bradspellberg.com/vaccine-rcts (All trials publicly documented with PubMed IDs)

I’m still blown away by the thought, time, and effort my fellow chiefs put into these graduation gifts… I’m so lucky to be a part of such an incredible group of surgeons. Travis, Dontre’, Kelly, and Kate…you’ve been the best work family anyone could ever ask for — love you all!

Good to know!

Shohei Ohtani’s home run really drilled this kid in the face 😭

At a time when people are understandably focused on the daily chaos in Washington, these articles describe the rapidly accelerating impact that AI is going to have on jobs, the economy, and how we live. axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-…

@GoogleAI Just spent 3 hours playing around with Jules, and am convinced that self-improving code has arrived. The acceleration of progress is about to take off — the paradigm shift is here. Hang on tight…

5 Moments That Changed the Way I Practice Medicine Not the biggest saves. Not the rarest diagnoses. Just a few that left a mark—on how I see patients, the system, and myself. (A thread.) 🧵

Make a huge mistake. Then make a false claim about how you fixed it. They did it for PEPFAR. Now Ebola. I follow this particular topic VERY closely, so here's what really happened and why this isn't true AT ALL...🧵

Lab-in-the-loop therapeutic antibody design At @PrescientDesign @genentech we have spent 3+ years reimagining drug discovery. We built a machine learning system to design and execute experiments. Here's how it works and what we can do 🧵 1/

The Trump administration's efforts to slash research funding have US graduate students, postdocs and other early-career scientists fearing for their careers. Some are considering changing jobs or leaving the country. Others say them might abandon research altogether. go.nature.com/4hO8k1u

After several delays, @DOGE has finally posted its purported savings. Why did it take so long to create a simple webpage with a 1000-row table? Who knows! Let's dig in. Headline number: $55B saved. They list the savings per nixed contract. This should be easy to verify then. 🧵

Remember this. Lock it in.

@tomowenmorgan This was pretty cool! Here was my response:

Pretty cool. Ask ChatGPT “From all of our interactions what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself”

Need a power/sample size calculation for a study or upcoming grant? Led by @emil_hs, we built a simple, free, and pain-free (!) shiny app. feedback welcome plz share with interested parties. check it out: powercalc.ca 🦾🤓 @sholzberg @kieranrcampbell @JeffsLianne @aaron_drucker @WallisCJD @NEJMEvidence @JonZipursky @ChanaSacks

I matched at @PennHeadandNeck !! So excited to train under such a world class group of surgeons; can’t wait to give it my all next year! #Fellowship

@MervinPraison @karpathy @phidatahq @pgvector @ExaAILabs @DuckDuckGo Would love to see local models integrated with the LLM OS!

GPT-4o : Build LLM OS from scratch @karpathy Using - @phidatahq 🔧 Create AI Operating System 🚀 Future of OS 👥 Multi-Agent Creation 📚 Knowledge Base @pgvector 🌐 Web Browsing @ExaAILabs @DuckDuckGo 🛠️ Tools Subscribe: @MervinPraison" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@MervinPraison YT: youtube.com/watch?v=GEQToo…