mconradi

Pancreatic cancer has one of the most suppressive tumor microenvironments in oncology. But two pancreatic cancer results dropped today. Both matter. 1. BioNTech mRNA neoantigen vaccine: nearly all responders still alive at 6 years. 98% of induced T cells were de novo — the immune system learned to see a cancer it had always been blind to. 2. Daraxonrasib: 47% ORR, 92% disease control as first-line monotherapy. KRAS G12D, undruggable for 40 years, finally has a drug. Different mechanisms. Same disease. Both working. <13% of patients survive 5 years. That number is about to change. great day for science! 🔥

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

Now that I have finally been paid I made a video about the Dana-Farber legal case from my own perspective: youtu.be/ioRtnMEV46Y

It is amazing just how much bad information and misimpression people have about data during this social media moral panic. Things I hear a lot: 1.) There’s a growing body of research finding at least a correlation between social media use and youth mental health. There isn’t in fact, quite the opposite: christopherjferguson.com/Social%20Media… 2.) Cellphone bans in schools have produced measurable improvements for students (they haven’t as I’ve covered on my substack several times, see: grimoiremanor.substack.com/p/another-stud…). US standardized testing has continued on the same modest declining trajectory. 3.) Bullying has increased due to social media (according to National Center for Education Statistics, bullying in fact DECLINED during the social media age). 4.) Reducing social media time improves mental health in experiments (it does not…experiments are pretty flawed but, overall, show little evidence for improvements). 5.) Children had healthier childhoods prior to the high-tech age (they did not in fact. According to government statistics, the children who grew up in the 70s and 80s, had the highest suicide, violent crime, drug and alcohol use, teen pregnancy, school dropout, etc. rates. Today’s youth are, by contrast, doing far better…even the mental health stuff seems to be downstream of their parents’ mental health struggles, not something done by tech). Be alert for these false statements. I see even a lot of critics of bans repeating them, but they are false and probably are only fueling the moral panic. Of course, I heard most of this stuff during the video game era as well.

@hugorifkind x.com/edwardgluce/st…

@addictedtoigno1 Well done Sholto - this is really terrific and deserves a very wide audience.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Agrees to Pay $15 Million to Settle Fraud Allegations Related to Scientific Research Grants. The relator [Sholto David] will receive $2,625,000 under today’s settlement. justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/dan…

Good to work with @senseaboutsci on this short vid: Key questions on public spending - Ask your evidence youtube.com/shorts/s7lZSas…

@GSpellchecker x.com/habibi_uk/stat…

@GSpellchecker was she arrested for tweets? or for public support for terrorism - in-person at rallies like thjis one? Seems to onlookers are much more likely to be encouraged to commit acts of violence themselves when they are amongst others hearing the same messages as opposed to online

The woman who has been arrested is clearly an odious antisemite. And perhaps her employer will penalise her. Perhaps they won't. However, you lose me when you think it's a good idea for the police to knock on her door and arrest her for tweeting her opinions—as disgusting as they are.

Just left synagogue briefly and read the news in detail. Sickening, surreal. For as long as I recall a fact of Jewish life has been security duty: ordinary lay members standing outside shul to create a physical and psychological deterrent against events like this. One always wonders - as I did recently, standing in a high-vis vest after agreeing to a far-too-irregular shift on a Shabbat morning, and as my wife has done far more often - how necessary that presence is. I was in Pittsburgh shortly after a white nationalist assassinated worshippers at a progressive synagogue, I've gone through what feels like military security to get into a shul in Sweden, I was in Paris days after a jihadist sought to murder shoppers at a kosher supermarket. And of course I've been in bomb shelters in the Holy Land. Britain has always felt different - a place where people, mercifully, do not have to die for being born Jewish. It is, by most objective measures, one of the best, possibly the best, places in the world to be Jewish, now or at any time in history. Yet who could say the last few years have not challenged that? Who today could say it is not necessary for us to stand outside our synagogues, waiting for an event like this befall us, hoping but not quite knowing this day will pass like all the others. I always find it remarkable that on the two occasions I've been to JW3 (London's Jewish community center) since  October 7, on every occasion, people driving down Finchley Road have hooted or screamed abuse at the queue of elderly folk shuffling in - I posted about both incidents out of some tiny sense of obligation, knowing they formed part of a bigger story, even if my Britishness, and Jewishness, both made me want to do the opposite, to ignore and suppress it. Until recently, our High Holy Days machzor - or prayer book for Yom Kippur - had remained the same since the 70s - written largely by Germanic Jewish scholars in the immediate shadow of the Holocaust, full of words and poems trying to make sense of that event. Seeing footage of a body soaked in blood outside a shul in Manchester, it feels like the penumbra of that period hover over us a little more today. On Yom Kippur the customary greeting is "Gamar Chatima Tova" - in short, may you be inscribed in the book of life for the following year. Which is why this attack, on our holiest day, is such an unimaginable affront to Jewish life in our country.

@stephenpollard @GSpellchecker I agree. I noticed that you posted this and it’s meaningful.

@GSpellchecker It really does matter. Thank you

I'm not entirely sure how much it matters to say things like this on here, but just in case. I really hope British Jews know that any and all attacks on them are deeply disturbing and intolerable to decent people. And there are more decent people than social media would have you believe.

The sad reality for Jews worldwide. Thank you to opera singer Sarah Callinan for shedding light on the growing antisemitism in the US and the heartbreaking level of security Jews need to attend their synagogues safely.

@thomasforth This is still a lie but in a different way. The Equiano cable does not land near Durham. In fact it does not land in the UK at all. submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/eur…

Good news is that using a better Google model made it tell the truth. Though it still gave me a scoop of cope.

As part of responding trolling to a trolling tweet by @GjMcGowan (what japes we have!) I asked Google AI if Google had any data centres in North England and,..... . . I'm pretty sure it just fully lied.

@fionamocatta @j4ppleby I endorse this post!!

@j4ppleby Falafel Feast, Finchley Central. Superb falafel (and more). Lovely owner and staff.

Best falafel in north London? I have an intense craving and am willing to drive.

Hilarious - "Zoe’s ‘wholefood’ supplement is ultra-processed" telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/2… "Writing in The Telegraph, Prof Spector has hit back at the “nonsense” decision and said the two ingredients in question were “culinary ingredients” and “beneficial for health”.

@portraitinflesh x.com/mconradi/statu…

I used to think it was below-the-belt to link Elon Musk with apartheid. He was quite young when the system ended, after all, and even younger when he permanently moved to North America. But what are we to do, when he positively invites it by posting hateful nonsense like this?

@portraitinflesh In this case he is actually - literally - correct. “South Africa's Black Economic Empowerment regulations require 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups for communication service providers” #google_vignette" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">africa.businessinsider.com/local/markets/…

This isn't some isolated outcrop of nastiness, either. The Anglosphere far right has been obsessed with a non-existent "white genocide" in South Africa for decades. The inference we're supposed to draw is, "this is what happens when you let black people run their own country".

I cannot change Ukraine’s position on Russia. The Russians are killing us. Russia is the enemy, and that’s the reality we face. Ukraine wants peace, but it must be a just and lasting peace. For that, we need to be strong at the negotiation table. Peace can only come when we know we have security guarantees, when our army is strong, and our partners are with us.

This is an excellent and timely factsheet on Ukraine, U.S. v. European security assistance, and other misunderstood or lied about aspects of the war, by our friends at @TheStudyofWar. I'll summarize a few main points below, with additional sources of my own: understandingwar.org/backgrounder/u…