Jason Locasale

4.2K posts

Jason Locasale

Jason Locasale

@LocasaleLab

Scientist and professor. Follow for science, health, and academic reform. DMs open • dr.jason.locasale@gmail

Raleigh, NC Katılım Mart 2015
548 Takip Edilen15.2K Takipçiler
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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
I’m collecting my longer takes and formatting them into more complete essays on Substack. They go deeper than what fits on X, and the bigger themes will be collected in one place: science reform, academia, biomedical and health science, public trust, and the future of scientific institutions. I may also write about scientific topics I’ve spent my career studying. Subscribe here: rebuildingscience.substack.com
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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
Spare me the sudden concern for “merit-based, expert-driven review.” Johns Hopkins and institutions like it abandoned any consistent commitment to merit years ago. They embraced identity politics in hiring, promotion, admissions, leadership, and the distribution of prestige whenever it served their ideological and administrative interests. The peer-review system itself is antiquated, opaque, deeply biased, and dominated by professional networks, institutional reputation, fashionable narratives, and conflicts of interest. Universities of their kind know this perfectly well. They benefit from those biases and use them against outsiders whenever it suits them. But the moment reform threatens their control over federal money, they brand the same compromised system as sacred, merit-based expertise and launch a political activist campaign to protect it.
Johns Hopkins University@JohnsHopkins

Johns Hopkins University has urged the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to reconsider proposed changes to federal research funding rules that could weaken merit-based, expert-driven review and destabilize America's research enterprise. bit.ly/4w1BVLT #ResearchSavesLives

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Based Millennial
Based Millennial@bsdmillennial·
@LocasaleLab Yea I have also seen how bad engineers and physicists are at biological experiments…they just don’t get that biology doesn’t work like equipment…
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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
One reason biology is not taken seriously by people trained in quantitative or physics-based science and engineering disciplines is that it often relies on loose or squishy metaphors and analogies to sell the importance of the work. The field substitutes loose metaphors, ambiguous biomarkers, and cartoons for quantitative precision, then wonders why people trained in quantitative or physics-based science and engineering disciplines regard it as a soft science. Terms such as “metabolic demand” and “T cell exhaustion” are stated emphatically in titles and abstracts and presented as cartoons in slide decks, but they are never rigorously measured or even defined. In economics and physics-based disciplines, where mass and momentum conservation are real principles, demand has a precise quantitative meaning: the total consumption, withdrawal, or output from a defined system or network. In biology papers, “metabolic demand” is usually meaningless. “Cell exhaustion” has a related problem. It is inferred from biomarkers or loosely measured functional outputs, or phenotypes, that are either far removed from the actual process, may not be rigorously correlated with it, or can have multiple ambiguous interpretations and meanings. This contributes directly to the reproducibility problem. Many biological claims are difficult to generalize because the central quantities and processes were never rigorously defined or measured in the first place.
Immunity@ImmunityCP

Online now: MEK-dependent bioenergetic demand drives terminal CD8+ T cell exhaustion dlvr.it/TTWYRh

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
Finance 101: money is fungible. Universities and academic medical centers insist that every dollar is trapped inside some sacred accounting category - endowments, grants, patient-care funds - until administrators decide they want to move money somewhere else. Then suddenly the barriers become very flexible. Academic medical centers have agreements under which hospital revenue flows through the university into the medical school to support the stated academic mission. Nothing prevents them from increasing the funds flow when margins rise or when a drug subsidy program generates a windfall. Of course they could direct more money toward research and teaching if that were their priority. They choose atriums, chandeliers, administrative expansion, and executive compensation instead.
Reggie Aurora@RAurora

@LocasaleLab You cannot spend money intended for patient care on clinical or basic research.

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
The main reason universities do not investigate research misconduct in good faith is that they are financially interested in the outcome. The grants are contracted with and paid to the institution. Then the same institution is responsible for deciding whether research conducted under those grants was fraudulent. That is an obvious conflict of interest. Universities have every incentive to minimize misconduct, protect grant revenue, avoid fines, limit reputational damage, and quietly make the problem disappear. Until individual investigators bear far more direct responsibility for stewarding public grant money, nothing will change.
Crémieux@cremieuxrecueil

It remains really remarkable that there is NO PUNISHMENT if academics do fraud in the overwhelming majority of cases. You can get caught knowingly lying and shrug it off. Admin generally won't pursue. And if you get investigated, they might let you off to avoid embarrassment.

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
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.
Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA@DrDiGiorgio

The 2025 340B data is out. Yes this is what excites me. We surpassed $100B last year. And, again, about 80% goes to the hospitals.

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
The reason these changes are now in play is that federal grantmaking has not been operating on scientific merit, transparency, or the public interest. Anyone who has watched NIH peer review over the years knows this.
Jerome Adams@JeromeAdamsMD

‼️ The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is considering a proposed rule that could fundamentally change how federal grants are awarded, reviewed, and terminated across the government. Whether you work in public health, medicine, science, higher education, state or local government, or the nonprofit sector, this proposal deserves your attention. Federal grantmaking works best when decisions are based on scientific merit, transparency, statutory authority, and the public interest. Strong peer review and expert evaluation have helped make the United States a global leader in research and innovation while ensuring taxpayer dollars support the strongest proposals. Public comments matter. Agencies are required to review and consider them before finalizing regulations, and thoughtful comments from practitioners, researchers, community leaders, and members of the public can help shape the final rule. If this proposal could affect your work, your institution, or the communities you serve, I encourage you to read about it and consider submitting a comment before the July 13 deadline. See next post for details on how to submit…

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
An administrator working for Columbia University, an overwhelmingly political institution, publicly advocates for a policy that preserves more money for Columbia, then dismisses mention of that obvious conflict of interest as speculation about motives. Columbia is free to stop lobbying Washington and taking political positions whenever it chooses. I remember being unable to give a lecture there without first declaring my pronouns. The politicization of science is obvious, and it is equally obvious where it came from. Now the same institutions that politicized science want to portray reform as the political intrusion. They do not get to rewrite history simply because reform threatens their money and control.
Ruben Gonzalez@rubenlgonzalez

Personal views only (not Columbia’s). US OMB has proposed changes affecting funded scholarship and research, including how grants are awarded or terminated. Comments are due tomorrow, Monday, July 13. You don’t need to be a researcher to comment. Template: aas.org/omb-comments

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
Whenever anything remotely newsworthy happens involving an infectious disease, there is a reflexive rush to blame HHS. The implication is that outbreaks did not exist before this administration and that RFK jr somehow caused each new one. No actual cause-and-effect argument is ever offered. What specific action from HHS caused the outbreak? How would the previous regime have prevented it? Those questions obviously go unanswered because this is not public-health analysis, it is partisan content pretending to be authority.
Pearl Freier@PearlF

Another update on the CDC under Kennedy/HHS's leadership:

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
It begins with defining the problem with peer review and acknowledging that serious problems exist. At the current stage, criticism is dismissed as an attack on science, and the people who make it are blacklisted from professional life. Only once the failures are clearly defined can we move on to the solutions and how to execute them. Those solutions will likely involve greater standardization, decentralization, and the use of AI to evaluate merit.
Vladimir Kogan@vkoganpolisci

@LocasaleLab I have yet to see anyone propose something better. Showing that a system is flawed is not inconsistent with that still being better than any alternative.

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
The same is true for universities and their medical centers. These institutions are committing a fraud when they portray themselves as poor and desperate for research dollars. The information is publicly available (see link below), including profit margins, assets, and executive compensation at these so-called nonprofit institutions. Anyone who has worked in research or education at one of these places knows how little the institution is actually organized around science, despite what its marketing campaigns tell you. projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/org… 2025: Duke U - Revenue 4.75B , Expenses 4.35B Duke U Hospital - Revenue 6.2B , Expenses 5.4B
Dutch Rojas@DutchRojas

Pick any nonprofit hospital in America. Pull its 990 in ninety seconds. Costs nothing. Twenty minutes of reading beats ten years of press releases. Their best defense is that you are too busy to look.

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
I actually published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, maybe more than half in top journals. I learned exactly what succeeding in peer review required. Peer review is a game, and not a very difficult one once you understood the rules. The fact that someone can succeed in a broken system does not make the system fair, rigorous, or worthy of preservation. The people most qualified to criticize peer review are the ones who know how easily it can be played.
American Joshua The Alpha 🇺🇸🇮🇱@GodofTheForest2

@LocasaleLab Every selection system feels broken to those who consistently fail to clear its standards.

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
Amazing how a university administrator’s "personal views" seems to discover the precise policy position that sends more money to his university.
Ruben Gonzalez@rubenlgonzalez

Personal views only (not Columbia’s). US OMB has proposed changes affecting funded scholarship and research, including how grants are awarded or terminated. Comments are due tomorrow, Monday, July 13. You don’t need to be a researcher to comment. Template: aas.org/omb-comments

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
Institutions collapse when competence becomes less valuable than loyalty.
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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
The people most qualified to call a system broken are the ones who proved they could succeed in it. For those who are not scientists, Richard published countless papers in Nature, Science, and Cell and was a Howard Hughes investigator for multiple cycles. Those are about the highest accolades the peer-review system can give you in the life sciences. He also did it without an Ivy League+ zip code, which is a strike against you before the review even begins. So when Richard says the peer-review system is broken, that should mean a lot.
Richard H. Ebright@R_H_Ebright

@GodofTheForest2 @LocasaleLab This one seems broken even to those of us who consistently clear its standards.

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
Scientific societies support bold ideas, especially after they are old, safe, funded, and endorsed by everyone they think is important.
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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
Everyone who has tried to get a grant or publish a paper in a top journal knows peer review is a deeply flawed system. At minimum, it is only as good as the quality of the reviewers, and reviewer selection has drifted far from merit, especially at the NIH. Given the technology available in 2026, there is no reason to preserve a system that operates as though we are still in the Middle Ages. Yet scientific societies are now engaged in a full-scale effort to resist any serious attempt to change the old system.
American Physical Society@APSphysics

Nobel laureate John Mather is one of thousands opposing a proposed federal rule that could affect science grant funding. "Peer review protects the public from attempts to corrupt," he writes. Read more public comments in #APSNews, then submit your own comment by July 13: go.aps.org/3RtXoy8

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Jason Locasale
Jason Locasale@LocasaleLab·
Academic science does not reward finding the truth. It rewards finding the next grant.
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Keşfet

@bsdmillennial @elonmusk @BarackObama @taylorswift13 @cristiano @BillGates @NASA @nikifrancismediavine