Danielle Beckman

Very honored to have given this Rising Star interview, where I could talk a bit about myself, my research, my passion for microscopy, and my dream to find a cure for #LongCovid one day 🥹 Link for the full interview: short-link.me/123uR Press release: eurekalert.org/news-releases/…

@PacoOnPause @erturklab This study is quite impressive. Spike protein was detected even in the skulls of patients who died from non-COVID-19-related causes. Why it is accumulating there? Why some people don't clear out these viral remnants? And how this impact long term immunity? So many questions...

@DaniBeckman @erturklab I knew you moved to Germany but I didn't realize you had joined the @erturklab - congrats! I share this study quite often, I wish more people knew about the spike protein persisting in the skull-meninges-brain-axis.

For #FluorescenceFriday, the work that motivated my move to Germany! I join the @erturklab to help develop novel approaches to neutralize and eliminate residual viral proteins commonly observed in #LongCovid patients, particularly in the brain. Keep an eye out for our work!🧠💪🔬

@erturklab You can learn more about the cutting-edge techniques we are using to address this and other questions relevant to human disease in the preprints below: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… biorxiv.org/content/10.110… biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

People who tested positive for #COVID have a higher risk of being diagnosed with other infections in the following months. This has been shown for years and hundreds of publications in the topic. Covid has an impact on the immune system we still don't fully understand.

@DrNeilStone Ebola doesn't get enough attention because the outbreaks occur in Africa. Imagine if it were in America/Europe.

Ebola is much more worrying than Hantavirus It spreads person to person and has caused very large outbreaks

@alzassociation Thank you so much everyone for the support! 🥰 Below it is how my story started 10 years ago. I discovered my passion also for neurovirology along the way, and that's the new chapter of my life here in Germany!

I moved to the U.S 10 years ago dreaming about helping develop a novel model of #Alzheimer, closer to humans. Happy to share that our last study at the journal of the @alzassociation, was within the top 10% most-viewed in 2024. The model now is being used to test therapies 🤓🧠

Does brain aging always mean vessel loss? 🧠We found a surprising hypervascularization, driving cognitive decline & blood-brain barrier damage in aging. 👇🧵biorxiv.org/content/10.648… Led by @MihailMuc

@alzassociation You can find the paper open access here :) alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/al…

@DiLibertoMD @TrendsNeuro @merkler_lab Thank you! There is literature showing SARS-CoV-2 N protein antagonizes INF by suppressing STAT1 phosphorylation (and nuclear translocation). There is also some data showing increase pSTAT1 in severe COVID‐19. I wonder if is the case in Long Covid also. Worth exploring :)

@DaniBeckman @TrendsNeuro @merkler_lab Dear @DaniBeckman we haven’t tested yet patients with neurological complications of SARS-CoV-2 but in general the STAT1 signalling can be detected in neurons of viral neuronotropic encephalitis and in neurons exposed to IFNg produced in response to other infected cells (e.g HIV)

When does antiviral defense become neuronal injury? We’re excited to share our latest work uncovering neuronal STAT1 as a molecular phase switch from protective antiviral defense to synaptopathy in encephalitis. @TrendsNeuro @merkler_lab cell.com/trends/neurosc…

@andrewwhite01 Should be a ban forever.

hallucinated references will land you a 1-year ban from arxiv now. wow

@ihtesham2005 David @davideagleman is here on twitter and his podcast is also excellent

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it. The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a third of its sleep hallucinating images instead of just resting like every other organ in your body. His name is David Eagleman. He runs a lab at Stanford. The paper is called "The Defensive Activation Theory", and the moment you read it the explanation collapses every other theory you have ever been taught about dreams. Freud said dreams were repressed desires. He was guessing. He had no brain scans. He had no electrodes. He had a couch and a notebook and a century of credibility that nobody has been able to fully scrub off the subject since. Modern neuroscience replaced him with the memory "consolidation theory". The idea that dreams are your brain sorting through the day, filing things away, deciding what to keep. That story is partially true. Sleep does consolidate memory. But it does not explain the single strangest thing about dreams, which is that they are almost entirely visual. You do not dream in pure sound. You do not dream in taste. You do not dream in smell. You dream in pictures. Vivid, detailed, often impossible pictures that activate the back of your brain so hard a scientist scanning you would think your eyes were wide open. Eagleman started from one fact almost nobody outside neuroscience knows. The brain is territorial. Every region holds its turf through constant electrical activity. The moment a region goes quiet, its neighbors start invading. They take the silent territory and reassign it to themselves. This is called "cortical takeover", and it is not slow. It is not a long process measured in years. In experiments where adults are blindfolded, the visual cortex starts processing touch and sound within an hour. One hour of darkness, and the territory is already being annexed. In congenitally blind people, the visual cortex is fully repurposed. It runs language. It runs hearing. It runs touch. The hardware never went unused. It was just reassigned to whoever showed up first. Now sit with the implication of that for a second. Every night, when you close your eyes and fall asleep, the sun has set. The planet has rotated. The visual cortex, which takes up roughly a third of your entire cortex, is suddenly receiving zero input. For eight hours. Every single night. For your entire life. And evolution has shaped your brain inside a planet that has been spinning into darkness for billions of years. If cortical takeover happens in an hour, the visual cortex should have been lost a long time ago. Stolen by hearing. Stolen by touch. Reassigned by morning. Humans should have evolved into a species whose vision works fine during the day and then degrades every time the sun goes down because the territory keeps getting renegotiated overnight. But that did not happen. Vision works the moment you open your eyes. Which means something is defending the territory while you sleep. Eagleman's claim is that dreams are that defense. Every 90 minutes through the night, a precise burst of activity fires from the brainstem into the visual cortex. Pontine-geniculate-occipital waves. PGO for short. They are anatomically aimed. They are not general arousal. They are a targeted volley of signal launched directly at the back of the brain where vision lives. The cortex lights up as if it is receiving real images, and you experience that artificial activation as a dream. The bizarre narrative your conscious mind invents around it later is just your brain trying to make sense of the noise. The dream is not the point. The dream is the side effect. The point is keeping the territory occupied. The evidence for this is the part that should haunt you. Newborns spend roughly 50% of their sleep in REM. Adults spend twenty. Old adults spend fifteen. The amount of dreaming you do tracks almost perfectly with how plastic your brain is. Newborns have the most plastic brains on earth. Their visual cortex is in the highest danger of being overrun by neighboring senses while it develops. So evolution gave them an enormous defense budget. As you age, your brain becomes less plastic, the takeover risk drops, and the defense system scales down accordingly. Eagleman and his co-author ran the same correlation across twenty-five primate species. The more plastic a species' brain, the higher the proportion of REM sleep. The relationship held across the entire primate family tree. Plasticity and dreaming move together. They are two halves of the same evolutionary equation. A species that ranks higher on flexibility and learning also dreams more. A species that is born ready to walk and survive dreams less. Plasticity is the asset. Dreaming is the insurance premium. And the prediction the theory makes is the one that quietly closes the case. Of all your senses, only one is disadvantaged by darkness. You can still hear in the dark. You can still feel in the dark. You can still smelll and taste in the dark. The only sense that depends on light is vision. Which is exactly the sense your dreams are made of. The defense system is targeted at the only territory that is actually vulnerable while you sleep. Memory consolidation is real. Emotional processing is real. Your brain does do those things at night. But Eagleman's argument is that those functions piggyback on a much older system whose original job was simpler and more brutal. Keep the lights on inside the visual cortex while the planet is dark, or lose it. For thousands of years, people have asked what dreams mean. Prophets wrote about them. Poets wrote about them. Freud built a discipline on them. None of them had access to the actual answer, which is that dreams may not mean anything in the symbolic sense at all. They may be the visible flicker of a defense system running in the background, the way a screen saver protects a monitor by keeping the pixels moving even when nobody is looking. The strangest thing about the theory is how cleanly it explains why dreams feel so real. Your visual cortex cannot tell the difference between a PGO wave and an actual photon. It is the same hardware lighting up the same way. The cortex does its job. It builds an image. Your conscious mind, half-awake, wraps a story around it and calls it a dream. You are not seeing your subconscious tonight. You are watching your brain defend a piece of itself from being stolen. Every animal that has ever closed its eyes on this planet has done the same thing.

@LauraMiers @Polymarket If you didn’t care about Covid in semen... well you should

@Polymarket If you didn’t care about Covid in semen, don’t pretend to care about hantavirus in semen.

JUST IN: Study suggests hantavirus may survive in human sperm for up to six years.

Ensitrelvir succeeded where Paxlovid had failed to show efficacy, in post exposure prophylaxis. It’s also been known for years that it prevents severe late disease in those already symptomatic as well as Paxlovid. Ensitrelvir should have been approved long ago. If it were from an American rather than Japanese pharma, it would have been.

@kadamssl 🥹🥹🥹that means a lot to me. Thank you so much!

@DaniBeckman Thank you from both of us. I actually thought of you in my mind carousel of brilliant women who have had their abilities challenged by people who could never dream of accomplishing what you’ve achieved.

It was revealed that my daughter was the only student from her class accepted to a competitive science-based program at a prestigious university. Cue the science bros - who didn’t get in - telling her she’s a “DEI hire.” The same song on replay, seemingly forevermore. 🙄

@StevenBalbus @AndrewKaufmanMD You don't need an electron microscope in 2026 to see viruses.

@DaniBeckman @AndrewKaufmanMD Well. Our own eyes and a little help from electron diffraction.

As a reminder, no virus has ever been proven to exist and any media headline or expert offering warnings about any new virus is simply trying to manipulate and frighten you.

@DoctorPerin This is me on my birthday every year.