David Basanta

MIT graduate student council "calls for adoption of preprints...to
accelerate communication of scientific discoveries, and restore healthy incentives" drive.google.com/file/d/1KLbj...

Total annual budget for NIGMS: 3.2 billion

Total (estimated) daily cost for war in Iran beyond the inestimable cost in human lives and suffering (and gasoline prices if that’s what you care more about, like many do): 900 million dollars (www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/p...)

🎉 The SMB #MathOnco Subgroup is launching its inaugural Early Career Awards!

Grad student or postdoc presenting at #ECMTB2026 / #SMB2026 in Graz? Apply by April 30th!

🔗 smb.org/call-for-award-nominations/

Tomorrow we're having the massive National Day of Action rallies to defend US science! I'll be speaking in the NYC rally in City Hall Park, from 12:00pm to 2:00pm. Join us! fight2win.standupforscience.net/NYC-March/ @standupforscience.bsky.social

Illustration of the macroscopic model we analyse in our paper, showing the two possible fates of the first surviving mutant within the wildtype population, superimposed on the house of a curling sheet.

Each week the MathOnco Newsletter features an artwork linked to a recent paper. My contribution slides Figure 1 of rdcu.be/e62W2 onto the ice of a curling sheet. You can read more and subscribe to this excellent newsletter at thisweekmathonco.substack.com/p/this-week-....

Florida places temporary ban on H-1B visas in university system The move followed Gov. Ron DeSantis’ call for universities to eliminate the visas. University system decision-makers expressed a willingness to be nimble

Florida prohibits universities from using the H-1B program to hire “new employees” until Jan. 5, 2027. The change will not affect existing H-1B holders, according to system Chancellor Ray Rodrigues.

@unitedfacultyfl.bsky.social

Mechanistic and data-driven modeling in mathematical oncology This Collection invites research on recent methods and applications in mathematical oncology that lead to mechanistic insight into cancer dynamics through ...

We have a new Math Oncology special issue in npj Systems Bio Apps. Looking forward to receiving your submissions!

Jointly edited by Jeffrey West, Sara Hamis, Robert Noble, & myself

nature.com/collections/...

NIH is not issuing awards. You may think that it's because they it is coming up with new directions of research...The apposite is true.

Here is a graph showing how many fewer new funding opportunities that NIH has posted over time.

-91%, a trend that started on Jan 2025.

Drop in overseas workers is ‘car crash’ for UK hospitals and care homes, say experts Care roles hit particularly hard by UK’s lurch to the right on migration, according to analysis of Home Office data

No nurses, despite an ageing population with increasing needs in an age where healthcare is becming more demanding.

No scientists, even though world leaders are looking for looking for new homes for tomorrow's discoveries

Thank goodness for the clampdown!

www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

Congratulations to you both

Never thought about this e-mail point before...yup.

Ukrainians are daily sacrificing themselves so the rest of us can live in safety and comfort.

Today, more than any other day, we should thank them.

“Kick it while it’s down” approach to cancer treatment could improve cure rates, suggests new study | City St George's, University of London Dr Robert Noble, Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematics, led the study based on modelling from evolutionary theory.

Some coverage on my university's website about our recent paper on evolutionary cancer therapy www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone’When Karen Newton left...

Hard to explain why the number of #tourists in the #USA is going down these days: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton-valid-visa-detained-ice

Three facts you did not know about publishing in Mathematical Oncology mathematical-oncology.org

My @mathonco.bsky.social colleague Franco Pradelli with 3 facts we didn't know about #mathonco
mathematical-oncology.org/blog/years.h...

I love #MatPlotlib and fear that this is just the beginning of what #opensource developers will have to tolerate: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

It's been a while friends partly because of good things, partly super sad. But now we have a year of fun travels in the works, so we're looking forward to introducing you to old friends, and new as we seek out cool new scientists to share their stories with you.
So watch this space!

After leaving WHO, Trump officials propose more expensive replacement to duplicate it HHS proposes spending $2 billion a year to re-create systems the U.S. accessed through the WHO at a fraction of the cost, according to officials briefed on the matter.

"This is not reversing the damage. It is spending more than we spent on WHO to create an institution that’s unlikely to survive and will certainly accomplish only a fraction of what we did by working together with the entire world.”
- Atul Gawande, @agawande.bsky.social

🎁
wapo.st/4tKRwyM

FDA reverses course, agrees to review Moderna’s flu vaccine The FDA reversed course and told Moderna it would review its application for a new flu vaccine, the company announced Wednesday.

Public pushback matters... and reveals levers of power.

www.statnews.com/2026/02/18/f...

And?

Censorship Is Bigger in Texas Texas officials apparently think Texas students are stupid snowflakes who must be protected from hearing controversial ideas.

"In recent months, Texas universities have inflicted some of the worst repression of academic freedom we’ve ever witnessed at American colleges, with gag orders, speaker bans and arbitrary firings of dissenting faculty."

The Trump administration is literally going to kill its supporters, and still they cheer the circus.

Congress defended American science. Its work is not over

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/02/05/congress-defended-american-science-its-work-is-not-over?giftId=ZjA0MjdmY2QtMDY0NS00N2U1LWFkOTMtM2Q5MzZhNWQ0NzY2&utm_campaign=gifted_article

Bernie Sanders: Do vaccines cause autism? Yes? No? Jay Bhattacharya: I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism... Bernie Sanders: Nuh-uh-uh. I didn't ask about measles. Do VACCINES cause autism? Jay Bhattacharya: I have not seen a study that suggests that any single vaccine causes autism.

Bhattacharya tries to worm his way out of *gasp* telling the truth.

RFK Jr.'s HHS is allergic to evidence: it shouldn't take a Senate hearing under oath for Americans to get accurate public health information — especially when lives are on the line.

Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology Abstract. The current economics of scientific publishing reveal a profound imbalance: academia pays prices far exceeding the actual costs of publication. R

Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology url: academic.oup.com/jeb/article/...

Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome - Nature AlphaGenome, a deep learning model that inputs 1-Mb DNA sequence to predict functional genomic tracks at single-base resolution across diverse modalities, outperforms existing models in variant effect...

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Two governors trying to figure out who can shoot themselves in the foot faster

The latest from @smbmathbiology.bsky.social #BiologyInNumbers: @math.onco's own Ranjini Bhattacharya, working with Joel Brown to study the role of #tumor cell-cell interactions in the context of #metabolism with #TheoreticalBiology #MathOnco […]

Science - U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM #Ph.D.s since #Trump took office:

https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-has-lost-more-10-000-stem-ph-d-s-trump-took-office

And if you'd like to know more about my path to London, check out the story here! www.moffitt.org/education/re...