Greg Neely

Our new paper!

@ProfRAScolyer Good luck Richard! Sending maximum positive vibes your way.

The recent treatment and testing by Dr Helen Wheeler’s (Neurological Medical Oncologist) wonderful team went well. However, I am a bit anxious about my next brain x-ray testing and treatment & other discussions coming up. It’s just before I’m due to start in the Tour de Cure cycling event in Tasmania! Fingers crossed xxx! #cancer #patients #glioblastoma #braincancer @NthSydHealth @SydneyLHD @COBLH @Sydney_Uni

NASA just dropped the closest image ever taken of Jupiter...

1 WEEK LEFT TO APPLY: We’re hiring 4 roles at UWA Plant Synbio Innovation Centre: Facility Manager + 3 Postdocs (single-cell genomics/screens; molecular tools; construct prototyping) bit.ly/4qfoftG bit.ly/3MFgD59 bit.ly/4pFT6jf bit.ly/48VkgLw

Synthetic biology 🧬 A genetically encoded device for transcriptome storage in mammalian cells | ⁦@ScienceMagazine⁩ science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Carl Sagan’s prediction about America, made 31 years ago.

@intocryptoverse 🤗 awe thanks Ben

Happy New Year!

Postdoctoral fellowship available in structure guided drug discovery in @RothLabUNC Please RT

A high-resolution genomic roadmap for chronic pain converges on glutamatergic neurons and C-fibers: doi.org/10.1172/JCI200… Erick J. Rodríguez-Palma & Rajesh Khanna @KhannaLabUF @uflorida provide a Commentary on Sylvanus Toikumo et al. (doi.org/10.1172/JCI197…)

@CMichaelGibson @nuclearball Just need to train more doctors, everyone makes a bit less and people don’t have to work crazy hours all the time.

As a physician, what is your view on work life balance?

@BenSasse There have been major advances in mRNA vaccine therapeutics for pancreatic cancer try to get your tumor sequenced and see if you can get into a trial nature.com/articles/s4158…

Friends- This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die. Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do. I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all. Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints. There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come. Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son. A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears. Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet. Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective: “When we've been there 10,000 years…We've no less days to sing God's praise.” I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape. But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9). With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices, Ben — and the Sasses

@MaxUnfried Lifespan is weird to study I find. 5-15% lifespan extension is really good actually. I have extended fly lifespan by >50% but it’s pretty hard to get that kind of effect in mice on an otherwise healthy baseline. Multiple 10% effects via dif mechanisms prob the realistic solution.

@Neely_Lab The point was more that 5-15% don’t really matter - except for academics to publish something. I’m all for more animal testing especially beyond lab mice.

We don’t need another study of a small molecule that extends mouse lifespan by 5-15%.

@SStevenWang @LGMartelotto Australia has been like this for years.

“American Science, Shattered” “A year ago, nine postdocs and graduate students made up the Quackenbush lab. Now, he’s down to three.” This is a Harvard lab. statnews.com/2025/12/05/res… Meanwhile it’s common for Chinese university labs to have 20+ people each. And for star researchers in each school, 50+, 60+ people labs. I’ve seen Assistant Professor with 70 people lab. How could American labs continue to win competitions in research with 1/10 of the lab size? The only option left for many American labs would be to intentionally avoid competing with Chinese labs, as Chinese labs intentionally avoided competing with American labs before. People should know what’s happening and what’s to come.

@TheBonnieChang @intocryptoverse @PeterSchiff @thedanahowell @BritishHodl @CryptoKid This is worse than the WWF “kayfabe” scandals of the 1980s!!!

The ‘Stockbroker’ and the Bitcoin crew @PeterSchiff @thedanahowell @TheBonnieChang @BritishHodl @intocryptoverse @CryptoKid

Please RT @hhmi_science #CechFellows Summer Undergraduate Research Experience - 9 weeks mentored research in an HHMI lab, $15K stipend, deadline to apply is 2 weeks away. See you next summer!

@intocryptoverse @coinbureau He always looks YouTube ready

Got to meet Guy at @coinbureau for literally the first time. Crazy to think it was our first IRL meeting

@AlanWilkinsonNZ @mayukh_panja Not even remotely

@Neely_Lab @mayukh_panja Clearly the creative genius of our era.

I have a PhD in Physics, I never call myself Dr. I will be patient when I explain this. It is fucking stupid and a relic of the past. The creators of PyTorch don’t have a PhD. Majority of the authors of the “Attention is all you need” paper don’t have a PhD. Elon fucking Musk doesn’t have a PhD. If you call yourself Dr. it is probably because you want to draw attention to your self image of being a smart person. Let me honest with you here: If you insist of having hierarchies, you are way down below in the pecking order. No one takes your bitch ass social science PhD seriously. You are well below the average code monkey without a Bachelors. And I think you know that.

@AlanWilkinsonNZ @mayukh_panja Above average manager for sure!

@Neely_Lab @mayukh_panja Pretty clearly Musk is not average.

@mayukh_panja @MaxUnfried Think about it less as how smart you are and more about how you can make a meaningful impact on a field that then translates into a meaningful impact on the world.

There is an objective hierarchy among academic fields and therefore not all PhDs are equal. Before you get upset, hear me out. I am a computational physicist, I solve partial differential equations (PDEs) on a computer to simulate real world phenomena. But if I were to try to understand string theory, it would take me a full year before I can even scratch the surface. Because I don't have the mathematical rigor for it. For a string theorist though, it wouldn't be too difficult to understand what I do. Similarly, I could pick up a psychology paper and understand most of it in a first read. But obviously the reverse is not true. It would be impossible for a psychologist to understand differential equations without any prior exposure to physics or maths. Humanities papers require almost no specialised training. Anybody with common sense and some English language comprehension skills can read, or even write a humanities paper. In fact, read about the Sokal affair. A professor of physics (Alan Sokal) wanted to test the intellectual rigor of a cultural studies journal. He produced some garbage that sounded good and flattered the preconceived notions of the journal editors and voila the paper was accepted. It became a big scandal back in the day. By and large, humanities papers are not very intellectually rigorous or demanding. Hierarchies exist almost in every realm of human endeavour. Not all sports are equally physically demanding. We readily accept that. Let's stop pretending everyone is equal. It is doing more harm than good. Before you come at me with pitchforks, I am talking specifically about academic research. I have deep respect for authors, journalists, musicians, artists, anybody doing anything creative and original.

@mayukh_panja *call

@mayukh_panja I only make realtors can me Professor. It shows that Musk doesn’t have a PhD. He is a manager not a scientist. PhD doesn’t mean you are better, but papers written by people without a PhD are prob on average much worse.