heiman.bsky.social
Associate Professor of Genetics
Harvard Medical School, Boston Children's Hospital
It should be fun, or what's the point?
http://heimanlab.com
167 posts
985 followers
210 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
comment in response to
post
That was me although I also had a wtf moment when I read it. It's in terms of whether the germline produces sperm or eggs.
comment in response to
post
The writer Joanna Weiss spent time visiting my lab and our local worm meeting and talking with us.
She highlights curiosity-driven science, the humor and supportiveness of the community, and the need for funding.
"Put simply: If you want to understand how cells work, it’s useful to ask a worm."
comment in response to
post
wait, Josh is listed in wormbase with allele designation tnm ?
wormbase.org/resources/pe...
comment in response to
post
I love this! I will enjoy those mutants even more knowing they are all cheesesteak alleles!
Mine are boring: hmn for Heiman and CHB for Children's Hospital Boston. (I felt bold to commit to them that way -- and then shortly after I did, the hospital changed its name!)
comment in response to
post
next up, resurrecting dire worms
comment in response to
post
In my teens a friend said that if I was dealing with someone on acid to ask them "What am I?". This came in handy years later in SF to shut off an aggressive person who kept getting in my face saying he could "see the wires in [my] eyes"!
Anyway this reminds me of that.
comment in response to
post
see:
Katz M, Corson F, Keil W, Singhal A, Bae A, Lu Y, Liang Y, Shaham S. Glutamate spillover in C. elegans triggers repetitive behavior through presynaptic activation of MGL-2/mGluR5. Nat Commun. 2019 Apr 23;10(1):1882. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-09581-4. PMID: 31015396; PMCID: PMC6478929.
comment in response to
post
happy to see this, @craigmcrews.bsky.social taught me undergrad cell bio (with joel rosenbaum & mark mooseker) ~30 yrs ago!
comment in response to
post
the best way to cut 175 words is to cut 500 words
comment in response to
post
In the first few months of his first term, Trump wanted to cap IDC at 10%, but Congress did not go along and included language to prevent this. MIT's alert from 2017 below:
orgchart.mit.edu/letters/mess...
comment in response to
post
Somewhat related Sydney Brenner quote: "The orgy of fact extraction in which everybody is currently engaged has, like most consumer economies, accumulated a vast debt. This is a debt of theory, and some of us are soon going to have an exciting time paying it back - with interest, I hope."
comment in response to
post
it's just nice to remember he was enjoying himself and having a good time.
comment in response to
post
thanks for doing the legwork with reporters! keep it up!
comment in response to
post
here's how it looked on Jan 24, courtesy of the wayback machine website
web.archive.org/web/20250124...
comment in response to
post
The spread is narrower than you might expect
bsky.app/profile/jere...
comment in response to
post
bsky.app/profile/heim...
comment in response to
post
What kind of changes require buy-in from individual institutes and what can be done by the NIH director unilaterally? Would institutes be a bulwark against eliminating training grants and fellowships? Can institute directors be replaced at will? etc. Thank you!
comment in response to
post
That sounds right. It's important to note the indirects do not go to the scientists. They are how the university pays everyone else who works there to support the research mission - janitors, plumbers, electricians, secretaries, accountants, safety officers, etc.
comment in response to
post
You can look up funding to any school here reporter.nih.gov/advanced-sea...
if you click an award, it will show the direct and indirect costs.
for example searching Texas A&M, it looks like indirect rate was 50%. you can also see their total funding and calculate what size hit they would take.
comment in response to
post
isn't defcon 5 the lowest level?
youtu.be/9RRGvAB4HF8?...
comment in response to
post
This was obviously just meant to see how I'd respond, but it did stick with me and has made me think about how to talk about results. What is the general principle or law, and in what other (maybe superficially dissimilar) contexts do you see it?
comment in response to
post
I remember a discussion along these lines with David Botstein while he was at Princeton, saying that in physics and chemistry, or even genetics, you uncover general principles, but dev bio (or maybe it was cell bio) is a collection of stories - they don't lead to "laws" like in other fields
comment in response to
post
bsky.app/profile/jere...
comment in response to
post
I called his office Wed and got back a generic email Fri about the value of NIH: "Massachusetts receives the largest share per capita of NIH funding of any state, and the Fourth District is home to tens of thousands of health care professionals."
If he has any plan to lead he's not sharing it.
comment in response to
post
we'd be glad to try ectopically expressing it in C. elegans neurons with dual cilia to ask if it localizes to one or both.
even though the protein itself is not conserved, I wonder if the underlying asymmetry in the cilia that lets it know which one to go to may still be there.