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levinchem.bsky.social
Associate Professor of Chemistry University of Chicago Single-Atom Skeletal Editing Husband, Dad, Crossword Addict http://levingroup.uchicago.edu
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I keep receiving these emails full of enthusiasm about the 50 alleged NIH study sections that will be (but really are not yet) on the federal register. Folks, council meetings are on an INDEFINITE hold. There is no grant happening. Let's focus on the issue at hand.

It's becoming clear that the only reasonable operating principle is that no new NIH grants are going to be awarded at least until the midterms. I'd love to be wrong about that, but any university or department that isn't planning on that basis is being reckless, imo

Waiting for those 50 study sections to show up on the Federal Register www.federalregister.gov/documents/se...

Looking at some survey data here. Trump/Elon cutting off all cancer cure research is the issue that freaks voters out more than any other, also the one they've heard the least about. Important for voters to hear more about this.

I don't know what Jeff Bezos means by "personal liberties and free markets." But I do know this: The biggest threat to personal liberties and free markets in America today is Donald Trump. My @postopinions.bsky.social column on this week's trauma at the Post. wapo.st/3DaSKxX

Today, the study section I am a member of is one of 26 out of 26 canceled. No new post on the federal registry and councils are postponed indefinitely. Universities focused on overhead cuts considering these a challenge to their survival. But *no grant at all* seems like the issue to battle first..

does it matter what strains they pick if there are no chicken eggs to make the vaccines in? 🤷 No 🥚 --> No 💉

As of today, at least 73 study sections have not met. If they review 50 applications, plus 30 triaged, 10% funding rate = 8 grants per SS. That's 584 fundable grants on hold. Probably 5000 researchers affected in those teams composed of our best and brightest. SABOTAGE.

10/10 study sections listed as starting today did not take place. No new post on the federal register as of now. The NIH onslaught continues.

imagine WANTING to receive two million emails

So, hear me out:

7/7 canceled today. No grant in, no grant out.

STAT story is up about study section restart. www.statnews.com/2025/02/24/s...

Who benefits from US funding uncertainty? Hours after posting this, I got an email inviting me to China with a “package to support my research for 20 years.” Apparently, generous offers are available to all good scientists!🧪🧠

This is supposed to be a visual proof of the Pythagorean theorem (you spin and it drains into the other squares), but @msichicago.bsky.social can't seem to get the fill level right - two photos, ~1 year apart

5 minutes scrolling through /r/gradadmissions will blackpill you on the future of basic research in the US. Thread after thread of young applicants from around the world giving up on their lifelong career dreams of becoming scientists, solely bc of uncertainty from the NSF/NIH funding cuts. 🫠

Don't forget that the lead compound for vertex came from a library developed in collaboration with the Jin Quan Yu lab at Scripps, using CH functionalization chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

😡 F'ing ridiculous. After updating its FAQ yesterday, NSF refused to directly answer a simple question: "Will the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) continue to award fellowships in 2025?" GRFPs are a lifeline that support 2,000+ graduate students/year. www.nsf.gov/executive-or...

1 and 3 are nice ideas until every university tries to do them at once. 2 leaves out massive swaths of basic research that aren't immediately commercializable. Research programs aren't supposed to be companies - if we were, why are we at universities?

Also just now, NIH intranet was updated re its communications pause. NIH scientists can now resume travel to and participation in conferences. The pause on updating the Federal Register remains in place -- which means grant-making is effectively frozen, in violation of court orders.

People have been proposing funding by lottery for a long time, but I think there are cheaper random number generators than ChatGPT

As others have noted, the life of Carl Bosch is worth a look in these times. Fritz Haber demonstrated that nitrogen could be reduced to ammonia, but Bosch’s work turned that into a technology that changed the world with sudden new supplies of fertilizer (and of explosives). (1/8)

We start our first post on Bluesky with a firework! Very proud of a brilliant team to publish our work on C(sp3)-atom transfer @science.org. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... It has been a very exciting journey. Thanks @erc.europa.eu

If the block on the Federal Register isn’t removed in the next few months, I fear a majority of labs will close within a year. This small procedural wrench has the power to kill US science indefinitely, losing an entire generation of discovery and innovation.

www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

I wrote last week urging Pharma CEOs to speak up about the Trump administration. Unfortunately, some of them have.

It looks like 8/8 study sections that were scheduled to begin today have been cancelled: www.csr.nih.gov/RevPanelsAnd...

The trump admin is using this to functionally disregard a court order unfreezing NIH funding. They are finding ways to comply without actually funding any new grants. This is a slow motion death sentence for US science.

Honored to be a part of this amazing cohort as a 2025 #SloanFellow ! #chemsky

Big fan of this work from the Kozlowski lab. My friends and I joke about it a lot but it’s funny how the more synthesis you do, the more you begin to enjoy/appreciate clever analytical strategies #chemsky doi.org/10.1021/acsc...

HHS blocked posting indefinitely. Not enough press is being given to this back door approach to blocking NIH grants. If and when it is lifted will still be 35 days before study sections can be held

well it has certainly been an amusing prank to let the worst people alive take over the american government for a few weeks, but I think it's probably gone on long enough

I thought I would take a brief moment out of my regularly scheduled doom-posting (and from posting about chemistry) to share my wife @lucia-petito.bsky.social's recently published paper in @annalsofim.bsky.social: www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/... Check it out!

BREAKING: Federal judge in Boston broadens block on Trump's NIH grant 15% overhead limit (indirect cost rates) to all recipients nationwide. Doc: www.documentcloud.org/documents/25... #TROpalooza ain't done

BREAKING The Trump administration is maintaining a funding freeze at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in defiance of two federal court orders. The ongoing freeze was confirmed by an NIH official and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information.

Those organic chemists have been getting too cocky lately, time to take them down a notch (make it illegal for them to mention the sixth element in the periodic table)

So fun hanging out with the future of science @uchichemistry.bsky.social and the 2024 Nobel Laureate John Jumper/recent UChicago chem grad. Inspiring on all accounts.

JUST IN: A federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the Trump administration's rate change to NIH grants. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...