Mike Gallagher

1/ Happy to share important work done with my co-author Andrew Khalil in the labs of Rudolf Jaenisch @WhiteheadInst @MITBiology @MIT and Dave Mooney @Harvard @wyssinstitute trying to assess and fix the major problem of transgene silencing in human ESC/iPSC based work

@Anbessaw1 @RAurora @LocasaleLab @NIH What metric shows that research quality has been declining? There may be decline, but I'd imagine that would be due to funding and job scarcity, which results in publish or perish competition.

@GeneticsMike7 @RAurora @LocasaleLab Still makes no sense. Whatever measure you use, US has been declining for decades, especially health & related research. And yes, it is all related to @NIH, fauci lies for 40 years, that scam guy editing med books 😂 failed policies, leftist agenda..

Universities say biomedical research will collapse without NIH funding because they have no money of their own. Meanwhile, nonprofit hospitals - many of them academic medical centers connected to medical schools and universities - receive enormous drug subsidies. They acquire annually more than 80 billion in subsidized drugs, then charge well above what they paid and bank the resulting revenue. That purchasing volume is substantially larger than the entire NIH budget. They bank the money, build atriums, expand administrative empires, and pay executives seven figures. Then they plead poverty when asked to support the biomedical research they claim defines their mission. Academic medical centers are wealthy healthcare corporations when collecting money and helpless charities when asking taxpayers for more.

@RAurora @Anbessaw1 @LocasaleLab Yes, one cannot fix a problem without first understanding it.

@GeneticsMike7 @Anbessaw1 @LocasaleLab I can understand some people are angry (like @Anbessaw1) due to the uncertainty and look for someone to blame. But blatant disregard for the facts is inexcusable and indicative of fundamental misunderstanding of the situation.

@Anbessaw1 @RAurora @LocasaleLab 2/ analysis of how research may have ended up affecting the economy and health of Americans.

@Anbessaw1 @RAurora @LocasaleLab 1/ Where are you getting these numbers from? DOGE wasn't able to show any quantifiable waste from their investigation into NIH funding. It's also very tough to measure if research money was wasted, as research outside of pharma is non-profit, and thus it requires a decades long

@Anbessaw1 @RAurora @LocasaleLab 8/ due to the mass production of cheap, addictive, calorie dense foods, that stock supermarket shelves, as well as a different food culture than in other rich countries. So, it really has nothing to do with the quality of our basic, translational and clinical research.

@Anbessaw1 @RAurora @LocasaleLab 7/ the reason Americans' health has flatlined or declined is largely due to obesity and related issues like diabetes, as well as opioid addiction, deaths of despair, and our much higher level of accidents and shootings that typically kill young ppl. Much of obesity in the US is

@RAurora @Anbessaw1 @LocasaleLab Yep. The whole waste/fraud claim has never been quantified, substantiated, or placed into this context.

@GeneticsMike7 @Anbessaw1 @LocasaleLab It’s reported that the ROI is 250% driving $94 billion in economic activity. unitedformedicalresearch.org/annual-economi…

@TheCinesthetic Why is no one saying Damien Lewis???

What foreign actor has done so many iconic American roles that you forgot they're not American?

@Anbessaw1 @RAurora @LocasaleLab If this is true then why is America considered the leader in biomedicine for the last 50 years? NIH has been one of the most successful govt organizations in recent history, wrt ROI, facilitating discoveries, and contributing to health.

@RAurora @LocasaleLab Yes, NIH has done worse amount of damage with covid, hiv, trans, dei, so many fakery, the whole medical system is been corrupted for the last 40 years. Shut it down! It is anyways damaging than benefiting society.

@Anbessaw1 @RAurora @LocasaleLab I’m not sure why you think American biomedicine is so bad. It’s been the #1 destinations for researchers around the world for decades. Everyone wants in, and few ever leave.

@RAurora @LocasaleLab That's the only way out for science & medicine in US. Health is above enterprise, money, politics, any agenda. No more relying on broken NIH

@Kevin_McKernan @LocasaleLab It’s pretty much true. There are very few labs that get enough funding from non-NIH sources to stay open. Most labs are in a constant state of financial uncertainty, with PIs spending most of their time applying for 10+ grants/yr, hoping to get enough to keep their job.

Nearly every person I meet believes all basic research would come to a crashing halt if you didn’t have NIH funding study section driven wealth redistribution. They have zero historical basis for that for opinion. zero quantitative understanding of how much the private sector over spends them in this area… Zero appreciation for where this money comes from and at what cost. It is the most economically illiterate group of elitist morons on earth.

@shannonrwatts This may be technically accurate, but you could point to many other factors that have similar explanatory value: globalization, The Apprentice, Middle East wars, social media, Comey’s pre-election statement, etc. Take just one away and Trump may never have been elected.

“‘Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president,’ Carville said. He argued that the Vermont Independent’s lengthy primary challenge to Clinton swayed voters in battleground states, weakening her prospects in the general election.” thehill.com/homenews/campa…

@ItaiYanai @bloodgenes Most people, not just politicians, don’t know this!

How science works according to Nobel Prize winner Thomas Südhof: Very often, politicians think that you can tell scientists what they’re supposed to discover. You can’t! Scientists don’t know what they are going to discover. They have to try things. They have to have curiosity and ideas, but they also have to have the knowledge to try things. Very often, it leads to nothing; it’s a waste. But we didn’t know when we started it’s a waste. But when something does work. When something clicks, it is exciting and rewarding but it’s never just one click. You get a result on it, you’re hopeful, you build on it. Maybe it’s confirmed you’re even more hopeful. So it’s an incremental process. It is never one thing - boom we discovered a major thing, my god this is it. It is more like walking up a flight of stairs where each step counts and the higher up the stairs you go the better you can see what’s on top and become excited about what’s there and how you can use.

@SashaGusevPosts Fun fact: inflation-adjusted average net cost of college has not increased in 20+ years! Public unis have increased a bit, but not privates. Massive increases in sticker price are canceled out by massive increases in aid. Fun topic to bring up at a party and see people's rxns 😬

@SashaGusevPosts I think renting, buying, college, and childcare the problems. Inflation just captures the cost of goods, but if you can't buy a house in a desirable place to live, and have lots of student loans, and can't afford daycare for your kids, ppl feel poor.

Fable won't do genetics but it can reproduce this income analysis and extend it to 2025. No matter how you slice it, every generation is doing better than the last and Gen Z is way ahead. Have you even said thank you once?