Michael Coleman

Importance: These findings support disease association studies to link programmed axon death to specific human diseases. It is essential to move beyond the limitations of animal models and work in humans to understand where best to apply drugs blocking programmed axon death. 4/5

@demrescommunity Wow! Thanks for this. Absolutely fits what I see. Another cause to consider: the false narrative that paper and grant reviews are an objective reflection of ability, leaving many wrongly believing they are “not good enough”. sciencewithoutanguish.com blog on this topic coming soon.

Third paper from our global ECR dementia survey now out. Led by Bryony Waters Harvey, it highlights mental health challenges shaping research careers. Read more: dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk/mental-health-…

@alifarhat79 Simplistic misrepresentation of academic research. Many discoveries are made in Europe and elsewhere in the world but commercialised by the US. A lot more is done in US by foreign researchers trained elsewhere. Characterising it as primarily US research is completely misleading.

The United States is responsible for nearly 45% of all pharmaceutical innovation worldwide, which comes from research funded by American taxpayers. Yet, Americans get the short end of the stick when it comes to benefitting, as we pay 3X more for the same pharmaceuticals (that we funded that Germany, and the rest of Europe does. Germany and the rest of Europe needs to pay their fair share, and they have an alarming habit of refusing to do so. Why should America foot the bill for Germany and the rest of Europe, when Americans pay way too much to begin with? It's time for the Administration to use its Section 301 power to hold Germany accountable and lower drug prices domestically.

How does the thalamus support consciousness? Our new study uses resting‑state fMRI to show nucleus‑specific thalamocortical connectivity changes during anaesthesia and in disorders of consciousness. #Neuroscience #Consciousness #fMRI #Thalamus academic.oup.com/braincomms/art…

@BetterResearch The role of imposter syndrome in ECR mental health problems is particularly sad because it is largely a consequence of how most of us talk only about our successes and keep quiet about our rejections. How many ECRs wrongly think this only happens to them? It's just not true!

Great to be involved in this work, we need to do better at supporting the Mental Health of ECRs… without them we will not make progress in beating #dementia

@DrPujaM @PhySoc @STEM4Brit @FrattaLab @wellcometrust @mndassoc @mndresearch @UCLBrainScience @UCLIoN Congratulations @DrPujaM!

Thank you @PhySoc for this honour. It means a lot! @STEM4Brit Grateful to Professor Pietro Fratta @FrattaLab, @wellcometrust, & @mndassoc/@mndresearch for their mentorship, support, & funding during my PhD @UCLBrainScience @UCLIoN 🧠👩🏽‍🔬

@sciqst Increasing SARM1 expression also lowers NAD (Fig, left). While less striking than the effect of activating SARM1 (right), activating it on a background of increased expression is likely to be particularly harmful.

@sciqst Lowering NMNAT2 expression increases axon vulnerability to stresses eg, impaired axonal transport or mitochondria. academic.oup.com/hmg/article/28… and linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S…. It also flips nicotinamide riboside from raising NAD to lowering it in some axons. link.springer.com/10.1007/s12035…

Delighted to announce the latest preprint from our amazing team: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… Laura Carlton and Emma Wilson report luciferase mapping of the human NMNAT2 and SARM1 promoters, naturally-occurring human gene variants within them and their functional consequences. 1/5

Congratulations to Laura Carlton & Emma Wilson on these exciting findings, their first primary research articles as first & senior author respectively. Also thanks to Heba Morsy for in silico promoter analysis. We look forward to working constructively with reviewers. 5/5

Importance: These findings support disease association studies to link programmed axon death to specific human diseases. It is essential to move beyond the limitations of animal models and work in humans to understand where best to apply drugs blocking programmed axon death. 4/5

@HedgieMarkets Pretty much sums up the current state of journal publishing. Rubbish like this gets through while respectable and honest science gets desk rejected. Our latest experiences this week. Journal publishing isn’t working.

🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks. The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people. ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher. My Take The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing. I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all. Hedgie🤗 nature.com/articles/d4158…

@Andrew_Akbashev Exactly! We’ve totally lost the plot of what good science is.

High-impact papers are crucial in academia. Like it or not. As a PhD student, you quickly learn that such papers are cool. They make advisors happy. Everyone admires you. During a postdoc, high-IF papers are not just cool. They are mandatory for a PI job. They give you awards and interviews. During the tenure track, they often become your ticket to a permanent position. Many young PIs are fighting to get their papers published in Nature/Science/Cell. It’s like getting a micro-Nobel prize. Many feel relaxed only when they publish in Nature (their tenure is finally safe!). But: Because such papers require a lot of time (often years), you live in constant uncertainty. You HOPE you will get it. You spend evenings at work, you look for stronger results, and you’re battling through a battalion of failed experiments. Then you submit it… Then: Stage 1. Editors reject 9/10 papers. Yours might be among them. Stage 2. The paper goes to reviewers but they are brutal. For some reason (and you know why!) they just don’t want to see your paper in Nature. Many papers get rejected in the first round. Stage 3. If reviewers can’t come up with reasons to kick you out immediately, they will request a lot of new experiments and changes to your work. Obviously, that will take months (if not years). Of course, some reviewers are great and genuinely help improve your work. But they are not as common as you might hope. Stage 4. After addressing all problems and submitting it again, you will likely see some reviewers still resisting. They can simply reject your paper because they didn’t like how you addressed their requests. Or they will find new flaws and will get you to do another round of revision. (If you’re lucky, they will accept the paper.) Stage 5. If reviewers are divided between “accept” and “reject”, the editors may send your paper to additional reviewers. That will start another cycle of hell with a likely negative outcome. Stage 6. If you are rejected, congratulations - you’ve just wasted months on nothing. But because you need that paper, you resubmit it to another high-IF journal, and it all starts with Stage 1. So, it’s like gambling. You gamble your career on this publication. During those 6–24 months of fighting with reviewers and editors, someone else may publish the same work. Then you’re screwed. Or your paper is likely not accepted in any high-IF journal. After loosing a year or more on trying to push it through, you will have to publish it in a low-IF journal. Is it a healthy game? No. You get exhausted. Anxiety skyrockets. But unfortunately that’s how academia works. I’ve been through this myself. Most of my colleagues have the same experience. We definitely despise it. And the worst part of it? We’ve started to see it as completely normal.

Grateful & excited: New paper alert by Simone Thomas with contributions from other @merkinpnnrcenter.bsky.social scholars —live on PubMed now. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41502156/ #MerkinCenter #MerkinScholars #PeripheralNeuropathy #NerveRegeneration #TeamScience #Neurology #JohnsHopkins

Delighted to say that our paper identifying a novel role for protrudin in endosomal fission has been published: Protrudin acts at ER-endosome contacts to promote KIF5-mediated endoso... sciencedirect.com/science/articl… @TheCIMR @juliakleniuk

@AlzResearchUK Congratulations Hilary!

We are delighted to share that our Chief Executive, Hilary Evans-Newton, has been recognised with a CBE in the 2025 King’s New Years Honours for services to charity and dementia research. Hilary has transformed Alzheimer’s Research UK into the leading funder of dementia research with the search for a cure at it’s heart. Read more: bit.ly/4sagcA5

Today in Science Without Anguish: 'It's not what you know, it's who you....trust'. When knowledge is really trust in disguise. And it's not absolute, it’s greyscale. Why knowing this helps us cope when our knowledge is challenged. sciencewithoutanguish.com/blog/its-not-w…

If you grew up in the 1970s, you probably possess these rare traits.

This is dreadful. Do we have to cave into Trumpism? This is not the US! It’s very simple: research in a culture of fear just doesn’t work. sciencewithoutanguish.com/blog/the-high-…. Funding research without also addressing culture is a waste of money.