jeremymberg.bsky.social
Husband, Father and grandfather, Datahound, Dog lover, Fan of Celtic music, Former NIGMS director, Former EiC of Science magazine, Pittsburgh, PA
NIH Dashboard: https://jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.github.io/index.html
5,418 posts
20,584 followers
1,156 following
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And the term "Bethesda Declaration" is useful shorthand for all of this ("waves arms wildly").
At this point, I went back to sleep.
/fin
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I think the #BethesdaDeclaration has substantially changed the conversation about what is happening with biomedical research and science more broadly.
The courage of the NIH public servants that allowed them to stand up is contagious.
6/n
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So, I emailed the link:
www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...
to my kids, some of my former graduate students and post-docs, and a few other friends. All in all, I shared the link with about 30 people.
I asked them to consider signing and to share the link with their own networks.
5/n
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(4) I recognized at least 1 name of every screen as a scrolled along. This suggests that we need many more folks to sign on so that my friends have more company.
(5) Remarkably, even after 3 hours, I still couldn't get back to sleep.
4/n
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Now, the bad news...
(3) There were quite a few names I expected to see that were not there. This suggests that we are not getting the world out adequately.
3/n
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(2) I recognized many friends from various stages of my career who had signed on, including new friends I have met on here on Bluesky. Most of these were scientists, but a few were not.
2/n
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I commend for this diverse group of people for confronting these issues when they are conceivable, but still far off on the horizon.
/fin
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The meeting, appropriately at the Pasteur Institute, taking place today and tomorrow, is intended to further discuss these issues and to develop international agreements about how to proceed (or not proceed) with regard to aspects of mirror-image molecules and mirror life.
13/n
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Last year, an international group published a Policy Forum piece in Science magazine calling out some of these risks.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
12/n
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BUT THIS WOULD BE A VERY BAD IDEA!
Mirror image systems that are capable of replication and evolution have the potential to be dangerous in some ways that can be foreseen and, no doubt, others as well.
11/n
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When all of this started, we fantasized about making mirror life. This was just a thought experiment.
But now, with the above advances and progress on making cells from scratch, realizing this fantasy, while very challenging technically, seems potentially possible.
10/n
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This field has grown tremendously over the years, with better tools for synthesis, mirror image DNA and RNA, and so on.
These mirror image molecules have considerable potential for many applications including novel therapeutics.
9/n
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Stephen Kent and others synthesized mirror image enzymes and demonstrated that the operated on the mirror images of the normal substrates, just as everyone expected.
8/n
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In addition, we collaborated with the DIntzis lab to show that the mirror image protein was very low-lived in mice (many days) and did not generate any specific immune response, even under conditions where the normal handedness protein did.
7/n
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@laurazawadzke.bsky.social was able to grow crystals of the racemic mixture of rubredoxin she made by mixing the mirror image protein with its normal handedness counterpart.
This was helpful for crystallography for a variety of reasons.
6/n
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In 1993, @laurazawadzke.bsky.social, a post-doc in my lab synthesized the first mirror-image globular protein, a small iron-containing protein called rubredoxin.
We demonstrated that it had all of the expected properties and the natural protein, except for handedness.
5/n
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If it were to be possible to switch the handedness of all amino acids, nucleotides, and so on, everyone believes life out be fine, just the mirror image of life as we know it
But even making a single mirror-image protein or nucleic acid was fairly daunting from a chemical synthesis perspective
4/n
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Chemists and biologists have been fascinated about this for many decades, trying to understand how, in evolution, one handedness was selected over the other.
3/n
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Subsequently, it was discovered that almost all biological molecules are chiral.
The amino acids that make up natural proteins are all of one "handedness".
This is also true for the nucleotides that make up DNA and RNA.
2/n
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Louis Pasteur discovered that tartaric acid existed in two forms. They were identical, except 1 was the mirror image of the other.
Molecules that can exist in two mirror image forms that are not the same molecular have the properties of chirality.
1/n
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Bluetorial: Mirror image molecules and mirror life
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Prof. Barres was one of my neuroscience professors at Stanford while Bhattacharya was year behind me in med school/grad school.
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Here is Carolyn starting her talk.
Note the NIGMS logo on the left top of the slide. We developed this when I was NIGMS Director and I loved it. Shortly after I left, NIH made institutes use uniform logos to improve NIH's brand recognition.
2/2
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I got the response yesterday...
Narrator: This thank you note is wrong in that Barres did not attend Stanford at all (MIT, Dartmouth, Harvard), but was on the Stanford faculty at the same time as Bhattacharya.
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Absolutely easy to do. I will try to post a spreadsheet on my dashboard as soon as I can.
Best, Jeremy
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UPDATE ON NON-COMPETITIVE RENEWALS
Since I always want to get the facts right, I checked NIH Reporter this morning.
Part of the issue was unusually slow uploading of data to NIH Reporter (more NIH dysfunction, just different).
Better, but still fewer than half of the awards due in May were made.
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đź’” Family relationships are complicated
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These clowns are exhausting…
The rescinded the rescission…
Within 24 hours…
www.statnews.com/2025/06/10/n...