Thomas Conway

The time of day for cancer immunotherapy is associated with major outcomes. Early is better. Results from a randomized trial of lung cancer, backs up the importance of our circadian rhythm and immune system nature.com/articles/s4159…

In honor of Bob Weir, here’s a monster The Other One from 1980 complete with huge Phil bombs, Jerry scorching and some Bobby riffing high in the mix.

Sticking with my original title proposal, "One Buffer to Rule them all, and in the Darkness Bind them" …rentprotocols.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cp…

Billy Strings bringing that sweet Appalachia sound back 🤠

Holy shit, Trey Anastasio from Phish is the warm-up act tonight!!! He will play with Dead & Company later 😊

Pauken, Markson, Sharpe et al. @harvardmed show that when PD-1–expressing and PD-1 knockout CD8+ T cells are within the same tumor microenvironment, both cell types exhibit similarly enhanced functions. hubs.la/Q03yMS7M0

I've seen enough: Zohran Mamdani (D) defeats Andrew Cuomo (D) in the NYC mayoral primary in a stunning upset #NYCPrimary

Depletion of extracellular asparagine impairs self-reactive T cells and ameliorates autoimmunity in a murine model of multiple sclerosis biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #biorxiv_immuno

🧠 New gut–microbiota-brain link found! "These T cells are primed in the periphery by the microbiome, and traffic from the white adipose and gastrointestinal tissues to the brain." "subfornical organ (SFO)" #microbiota #microbiome #gut #brain nature.com/articles/s4158…

@daccacheja @DrShrutiNaik @SinaiImmunol @MSHSDerm Let’s go Joe!

Thrilled to have had my F31 funded by the NIH! With the amazing mentorship of @DrShrutiNaik and #KellyRuggles, I’m excited to push our knowledge of inflammatory memory forward and tap into the potential of this field! @SinaiImmunol @MSHSDerm

The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. hrvd.me/ResearchFundin…

Obama: Imagine if I had done any of this. Imagine if I had pulled Fox News’ credentials from the White House press corps. Imagine if I had said to law firms that were representing parties that were upset with policies my administration had initiated, that you will not be allowed into government buildings. We will punish you economically for dissenting from the Affordable Care Act or the Iran deal. We will ferret out students who protest against my policies. It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me, or a whole bunch of my predecessors.

🔥Our latest work is out in PNAS! We report a mechanically resilient hydrogel that enables sustained, localized delivery of therapies for post-traumatic osteoarthritis, without breaking down under physical activities like running! pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… @PNASNews

Resignation letter of Peter Marks from FDA’s director for the center for biological evaluation and research

What do Pablo Picasso and Charles Janeway have in common? Both were interested in patterns of life. Janeway was focused on pathogen associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) that are detected by our immune system. But what are these patterns he refers to?

Out today in @ScienceMagazine! We show that rising self-antigen levels during infection give self-reactive T cells an opportunity for enhanced TCR signalling. Regulatory T cells of matched specificity counteract this, thereby preventing autoimmunity. buff.ly/3EXaXQa

Halt!!!! 👏 politico.com/news/2025/02/1…

Hmm. There are two errors in this, and also the new 15% limit is way too low. And finally this is an unintentional call for communism. (1) First error. This charge isn’t for “overhead”. It does include overhead, but it also includes “General & Administrative” costs. For example, there are two types of people who work on government contracts. (A) Those who do the technical part of the work. Their labor is counted as a “direct cost”. (B) Those who do all the other types of work for the contract, including management, safety, security, contracts management, accounting, project management, etc. It is all real work that has to be done for the contract to be successful, and the people who do that work all need to get paid or the university/company would lose money on the contract and therefore would choose to stop doing any work for the government. It is such a high rate because a lot of people do real work on contracts. (2) Second error. A 60% indirect rate does not mean that 60% of the money is being siphoned off for indirect costs, but only 37.5%. That’s because 100% of the direct costs get charged, plus another 60% to cover the indirect costs, so the total charge is 160% of the direct costs. 60% divided by 160% is 37.5%. So 37.5% of the total payment is being siphoned off to cover the indirect costs, or about 1/3. Is 37.5% more reasonable than 60%? Yes, and it is all audited by the government for every university and every company line-by-line to make sure all the indirect cost charges are real work being done and are all justified. Could the government run a much tighter ship during these audits and demand that indirect costs come way down? Maybe so, but 15% seems way, way too low. Which is the third point. (3) According to Grok, this isn’t just universities. Large companies also charge 40% to 60% for their indirect rate. I don’t know what SpaceX charges for its indirect costs, but it isn’t building rockets for the government as charity, so they aren’t going to give away the indirect labor to the government for free. Since indirect costs are real costs, they have to be built into the price or the universities/companies would lose money doing research for the government so they would choose to stop doing research for the government. Does the United States want universities and companies to do research or not? If yes, then we have to pay the total of the real costs, both direct and indirect. I think 15% is way too low. Maybe 40% is a good number to make universities try to shoot for instead of 60%. The goal here is to get the most research we can out of the tax money. Offering to pay much less than the real costs will result in less research from US universities, not more. Which brings us to the fourth point. (4) Final point: whether universities have big endowments or not is irrelevant. That’s like saying the government shouldn’t pay SpaceX the full cost on its contracts because Elon already has a lot of money. We don’t pay based on what people have, but on the value of their work. Pay is the motive to do the work in capitalism. By saying pay should scale with what you already have, Elon is unintentionally calling for communism: “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need.” The problem is that communism doesn’t work. If we want good research, we have to pay for it regardless whether the universities are rich or poor.

When I think of Jerry Garcia, I think of melodic poetry being vocalized with six strings, and one of the greatest musicians to ever live. That's why it's always worth making something great like this just a little bit better <3 #gratefuldead #jerrygarcia

"It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet's perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness." - George Oppen