Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

Katalin Karikó won a Nobel Prize for her work on the COVID mRNA vaccines. Yet just 10 years earlier, UPenn kicked her out of academia.

"They told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality. When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.'"

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfizer-biontech

The Pythagorean Theorem is at least a thousand years older than Pythagoras. Turns out Babylonians knew some pretty advanced math.

https://www.iflscience.com/pythagorean-theorem-found-on-clay-tablet-1000-years-older-than-pythagoras-70934

On #EMmonday we’re highlighting slit assembly in Drosophila nephrocytes. Marta Carrasco-Rando, Mar Ruiz-Gómez and colleagues @CBMSO_CSIC_UAM discover that an acytokinetic cell division breaks membrane symmetry during slit diaphragm assembly.
📖 @Dev_journal: https://journals.biologists.com/dev/article/150/18/dev201708/328448/An-acytokinetic-cell-division-creates-PIP2
#OpenAccess

"After realising that many notable women working in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) and others from minority backgrounds did not have Wikipedia pages, though they were deserving of them, she decided to start them herself, one every day. Each one takes “a few hours” to write, she says. It’s a task, she confesses, that she somehow completes while simultaneously watching real estate shows on Netflix in the evening. To date, she has contributed more than 2,000 entries."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/oct/01/why-are-they-not-on-wikipedia-dr-jess-wades-mission-for-recognition-for-unsung-scientists?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

A CRISPR-based strategy to promote endogenous fetal hemoglobin re-expression to treat sickle cell disease: my latest Nature Medicine column.

#SickleCell #GeneTherapy #Crispr

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41591-023-00088-6

A Galaxy of informatics resources for MS-based proteomics https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14789450.2023.2265062

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#proteomics #prot-paper

Swedish medical physicist and "Father of Radiation Protection" Rolf Maximilian Sievert died #OTD in 1966.

He played a pioneering role in the measurement of doses of radiation especially in its use in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. In later years, he focused his research on the biological effects of repeated exposure to low doses of radiation. He was a founder of the International X-ray and Radium Protection Committee (later became ICRP) in 1928. He also chaired the UNSCEAR.

#science

Shift Happens is a beautifully designed history of how keyboards got this way https://arstechnica.com/?p=1972356

#intro #présentation

Je suis chercheuse en #Economie du #ChangementClimatique au centre-cired.fr. Je travaille sur les impacts du changement climatique et sur les trajectoires et politiques d'atténuation du CC, en me concentrant souvent sur les liens avec les #inégalités.

J'ai participé au rapport du #GIEC sur l'atténuation, et je suis membre du Haut conseil pour le climat.

Je parlerai ici de #recherche, #enseignement, #interdisciplinarité, #transformations pour notre avenir commun.

A bit of a #introduction for all my new followers:

Listen: you're gonna get some posts about fruit flies. I can't stop it, it just happens. They got me good. Plus #Infection #Microbiome #Immunity #Evolution 🦠

But I also follow this #AcademicChatter and #PublishOrPerish conversation closely, and obviously #ScientificPublishing 👍

Damn.

'That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”

https://www.glamour.com/story/katalin-kariko-biontech-women-of-year-2021

'My own dismay and rage have lasted. The casual way in which all of our works were taken without permission and tossed into the AI blender feels like a violation. The one novel I have in this mix is hardly War and Peace — but it stings that none of these corporate behemoths thought to ask thousands of writers if we wished to contribute to AI models that might eventually replace us.'

https://www.ft.com/content/6342aa55-a776-4268-af0a-29bdae082ee3

'(...) Karikó “never received an R01 one grant from [the National Institutes of Health] which is a clear sign that she struggled and didn't get recognition for the importance of her vision"

https://www.science.org/content/article/mrna-discovery-paved-way-covid-19-vaccines-wins-nobel-prize-physiology-medicine?utm_medium=ownedSocial&utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=NewsfromScience

"Scholars and publishers have our own unique areas of expertise, responsibilities, and experiences of the manifold crises into which higher education is perpetually forced. But at base, scholars’ working conditions are publishers’ working conditions. If we want to change these conditions, we have to begin by recognizing—and working together to find—our common ground. Manufactured austerity; corporatization; competition over supposedly scarce resources; attrition and downsizing; mass PhD production; adjunctification; shrinking enrollments; escalating expectations to publish or perish; and, of course, the ongoing devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the right’s war against academic freedom: these issues affect us all."

https://www.publicbooks.org/publishers-and-scholars-unite/