Christopher Garris

@JanssensLab @SanchoLab @victor @natcomms Nice story. This will be a good read!

Almost 15 years after our initial observation that IRE1 is specifically active in cDC1s, we finally start understanding why… Check out the new study from @victor.bosteels, published in @natcomms.nature.com Paper in press @ rdcu.be/fur4Q

@MiriamMerad @ScienceMagazine @jboumelha @SinaiImmunol This is fantastic and elegant connects so many pieces of the puzzle of TLS. A tour de force.

Excited to share our new study @ScienceMagazine by the fantastic Raphael Mattiuz and @jboumelha @SinaiImmunol showing how DC build and sustain tertiary lymphoid structures in cancer. A major step toward enhancing anti-tumor immunity (1/2) science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@stefan_rucman @LocasaleLab So for example someone coming in with no indirects doesn’t really make money for the institution and is more of a liability in regards to space and infrastructure etc.

@stefan_rucman @LocasaleLab Not precisely. Funding is not equal. Many private funders cap “indirect rates” usually between 5-15%. Some foundations have a policy of paying 0%. Federal funds are more desirable and usually have full indirects (60-80%) so the institute gets more with federal dollars.

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.

@LabWaggoner @ImmunityCP It’s very sad to see such a visionary scientist die so young. He will be remembered.

Philippe Bousso (1971–2026) @ImmunityCP cell.com/immunity/fullt…

@TheBrysonLab @jkagan1 Yes. The provocative tease is a giveaway.

@csgarrix @jkagan1 I was thinking the same thing

A query for the immunologists: Are there any PAMPs left to discover?

@thenewarea51 My favorite Sam Neill film was Event Horizon.

God rest his soul, he will live on forver through his great films. But my favorite, The Hunt for Red October “I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits and she will cook them for me.”

@LocasaleLab Neurodivergence is a way to reduce bias. youtu.be/tInDH2FeXaM?si…

Newton, Dirac, Feynman, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Nash, Tesla, Boltzmann, Gödel, Oppenheimer, Turing, Van Gogh, Picasso, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Bobby Fischer would all have had HR problems in today’s universities. A scientist or any brilliant mind should be judged primarily by their creative work, not by whether their personality satisfies corporate managerial expectations.

Tumors are reprogrammed in vivo into a universal vaccine, triggering a robust immune response to eradicate cancer @ScienceAdvances 🇨🇳 science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@SVVVAYED It’s great for this, but it gets less dumb as you feed it more content.

@LocasaleLab There’s also something to be said about the marginal utility of salary once one is past reasonable needs. It’s generally wasteful spending after a certain point and could be better used to fund young investigators or make childcare somewhat affordable.

@LocasaleLab It’s hard to understand why those positions aren’t indexed to the NIH grant salary cap, currently $234,200; or NIH leadership scales which can be nearly $400,000. Those compensation guidelines are more than sufficient earnings, and NIH usually handles a much larger bureaucracy.

The public would be shocked if they understood how many nonprofit scientific and medical organizations have administrators earning compensation packages that rival those of major corporations. Administrative salaries at scientific and medical societies routinely reach seven figures. Within academia, these positions are among the most coveted career paths for exactly that reason. The typical defense is that these salaries reflect the complexity of managing large organizations, navigating regulations, ensuring compliance, and overseeing large operations. The real reason is much simpler and gets to the point Christopher is making. These institutions operate with enormous revenue streams from the government and enjoy very high margins. The people deciding how those resources are allocated are the same people whose salaries are paid from those resources. The normal mechanisms that impose discipline on spending are absent. There is no shareholder pressure, no market pressure, and limited public scrutiny. When the people controlling the budget are insulated from competition and accountability primarily to one another, administrative compensation grows.

@stefan_rucman @LocasaleLab You can search other non profits and see examples of high executive compensation. It boils down to accountability. If there are few external pressures to encourage efficiency, then efficiency won’t happen. If a lawn gets over fertilized, then weeds grow.

@csgarrix @LocasaleLab OMG 😲 WOW. Well we had executive of Hospital who got 6 figures like 300 000 USD per year on North of Thailand. He cried and complained about USAID cut. People found out how much was he making

Nothing says institutional decline like celebrating discoveries made under a system you no longer believe in. MIT’s media feed is a museum from a scientific culture it more than a decade dismantling. The Whitehead Institute is a bloated hedge fund pretending to be a research institute inside MIT, paying administrators seven-figure salaries while diverting resources away from merit and scientific excellence. Anyone can look at the scientists it hired over the past decade and the ones it fired or forced out. The story is obvious. What is especially revealing is the scientist they are highlighting here. Whitehead presents him as the face of the institution, but he appears to have little to no influence over the institution itself. They even forced out or fired one of his closest friends and scientific colleagues, and he was irrelevant to stop it. That tells you what you need to know about what Whitehead has become. At this point, scientists like him are marketing assets for MIT. Their discoveries, reputations, and credibility are used to promote an institution controlled by administrators who contributed nothing of consequence to the science that gave MIT its brand.

@stefan_rucman @LocasaleLab Non profits have to report this and it can be readily searched on ProPublica. Link here: projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/org…

@LocasaleLab Administrator in MIT have 7 figures? Most stuff complained they make little

Review @JExpMed @BhardwajLab Leveraging cDC1 biology and function for enhanced immunotherapy rupress.org/jem/article/22…

Excited to share out latest work, out this week in @NatureGenet . In this study, we using CRISPR screens to explore how sensing inflammatory cytokines exposes new tumor-intrinsic dependencies. @broadinstitute @MGBResearchNews nature.com/articles/s4158…

@chorye I recall that the prior attempt to cap NIH grant support was about 3 grants per investigator. That was about a decade ago when proposed.

In other news, today the NIH proposed caping the maximum of grants at 2 per research lab, including collaborations. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/n… We're living in the upside down.

Important Request for Information (RFI) from @NIH “Proposal to Cap the Number of Simultaneous Research Project Grants per Principal Investigator to Support More Researchers and Maximize Scientific Productivity and Innovation” grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/n… Some suggested caps & impact: