Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org
I've worked on all of science, from B cells to T cells.
https://fellowsherpa.com
Joined Nov 2022
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
The newly EU-funded MICROBES4CLIMATE brings together 30 partners from across #Europe, including SIB, to look at how #microorganisms can improve the #climateresilience of #plants and #crops.
The aim? To provide researchers with an integrated network of infrastructure to foster #openresearch #data and boost our knowledge on the topic.
More about this endeavour and our expertise in knowledge representation and #environmental #bioinformatics: https://www.sib.swiss/news/unlocking-the-potential-of-microbes-to-make-plants-climate-resilient @dessimoz
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
Twitter/X "will collect information about the location of users and their private messages, which may constitute mass surveillance."
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/09/global-xs-new-policy-risks-violating-right-to-privacy-for-millions/
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
Elizabethan insults. Pot & lit by @hunchbacksociety
#Ceramics #stoneware #pottery #Handmade #Art #stoneware #artgallery #artmastodon
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
How do we support the Katalin Karikó's?
There's a lot of reasonable outrage today around how Katalin Karikó was treated throughout her career (full disclosure: by my employer, UPenn). Obviously a number of someones made a huge mistake by not recognizing the brilliance and potential of her work - no question there!
What I've been thinking about and I'd love to get some scenius input on: how could we, as an academic community, do better?
Here's one summary of what happened:
https://billypenn.com/2020/12/29/university-pennsylvania-covid-vaccine-mrna-kariko-demoted-biontech-pfizer/
Taking seriously the notion that 1) we want to support the Katalin Karikó's but 2) high-risk, high-reward research takes time, here are a few ideas:
*) Better support to help geniuses communicate (and fund) their ideas.
*) More funding for high-risk, high-reward projects
*) A longer evaluation period for individuals engaged in high-risk/high-reward research
What would you add/change?
"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."
'(...) 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"
'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
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
The far-right Christian group that destroyed Roe v. Wade is now aiming to roll back birth control and LGBT rights.
Important New Yorker report here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/alliance-defending-freedoms-legal-crusade
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
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
"Psychologists in particular wanted a statistical skeleton key to unlock true experimental insights. It was an unrealistic burden to place on statistics, but the longing for a mathematical seal of approval burned hot."
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/statistical-significance-p-value-null-hypothesis-origins
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
'Por exemplo, no Verão de 2021, diziam: “Primeiro, vão vacinar-nos, depois vão tirar-nos as armas e as bíblias.” Tornou-se uma espécie de plataforma importante do Partido Republicano. Durante esse Verão, quando a variante Delta atingiu a Europa e os Estados Unidos, as pessoas morreram nos Estados Unidos porque se recusaram a aceitar as vacinas, apesar de estas estarem disponíveis gratuitamente.'
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
An evening well spent, IMO
"I actually don’t watch a ton of blockbusters, but in the early pandemic, I got extremely bored, drank half a bottle of wine, and rewatched Speed on a cold night."
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2023/10/speed-blockbuster-90s/675521/
A CRISPR-based strategy to promote endogenous fetal hemoglobin re-expression to treat sickle cell disease: my latest Nature Medicine column.
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
"Defining that threat is not simple. The challenge is to do for infectious diseases what other researchers can now do for droughts or hurricanes: “attribute” events to climate change. “The very cutting edge right now is actually trying to start doing attribution … to say, for each degree of temperature change, how many more cases do we get?” says Erin Mordecai, an infectious disease ecologist at Stanford University."
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
'Los notables avances contra el cáncer logrados por la medicina en las dos últimas décadas tienen para el oncólogo Aleix Prat (Barcelona, 44 años) un lastre que limita su potencial: el escaso diagnóstico molecular que se realiza de los tumores, algo que impide identificar a los pacientes que más podrían beneficiarse de las terapias innovadoras. “Necesitamos tratar a 10 enfermos para que apenas se beneficien dos o tres. El resto paga un alto precio en toxicidad y, además, el coste económico para el sistema es insostenible”
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
'Imaginem que três toureiros se juntavam a uma manifestação contra as touradas. Foi o que aconteceu no sábado quando três deputados do Chega tentaram participar na manifestação “Casa para viver, planeta para habitar”.
https://www.publico.pt/2023/10/02/opiniao/opiniao/casa-viver-manifestacao-parasitar-2065261
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
Dr. Kariko was denied promotion at Penn because she couldn't rack up the NIH grants. Yet. She persisted. #COVID #vaccine #Nobel https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/health/nobel-prize-medicine.html
Elizabethan insults. Pot & lit by @hunchbacksociety
#Ceramics #stoneware #pottery #Handmade #Art #stoneware #artgallery #artmastodon
Thiago Carvalho
boosted
Online Now: ATR promotes clearance of damaged DNA and damaged cells by rupturing micronuclei https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(23)00698-6?rss=yes&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
I've worked on all of science, from B cells to T cells.
https://fellowsherpa.com
Joined Nov 2022
