The most impt change at #NIH and to US science this year is bigger than grant cancellations— it’s how the agency is governed.
For 75 years NIH has been largely independent of presidential control. That’s changed this year. New piece from me and @nataliebaviles.bsky.social in @nature.com
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Stand Up For Science, SF! #standupforscience
This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.
It does not.
It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.
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💯! But something similar, though less overtly political, is happening with the rise of donor-funded science. Donors have agendas too, and it's not realistic for scientists to think they can stay uncorrupted by that. Plus, the donor class is increasingly right wing, even if they don't advertise it.
Just added this to my WordPress site, so it's free to read.
homunculusmusic.wordpress.com/2026/02/14/e...
🚨 New from me: Grant review at more than half of NIH's institutes could be frozen by the end of the year.
That's because crucial NIH grant-review panels are slated to be empty at those institutes by Jan 2027.
A wonky bureaucratic problem with big implications.
A short 🧵
Honestly, maybe! There are lots of transcribers out there, integrations w/ EHR, and for sure OpenEvidence, which has taken the academic medical community by storm. We're gonna have to be clear-eyed about how medical AI is being used if we want to stand a chance of reforming it for the better.
Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike.
The 10th of these, would you believe?
This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more
Enjoy!
medium.com/the-spike/20...
Exactly right! iTBS studies are ongoing and will definitely help us build out the picture.
While limited by the very small N=2 sample (in an epilepsy cohort!), this is intriguing evidence from direct in-vivo human recordings that depression treatment w/ TMS specifically affects the sgACC, in the direction of neural suppression. Next steps: Do we observe similar effects using iTBS?
Replicating findings from the fMRI literature, we also observed anticorrelated HFA between the DLPFC and sgACC following TMS pulses. The sgACC was particularly anticorrelated with the DLPFC relative to other brain regions (meaning, this relationship was anatomically specific and not brain-wide). 4/
Depiction of TMS-iEEG experiments and spectral activity provoked by single pulse TMS; marked decreases in HFA are noted in active but not sham conditions.
Using combined TMS and intracranial EEG in two neurosurgical patients, we showed that single TMS pulses caused brief, transient suppression in high-frequency activity (HFA), generally considered to be reflected of population-level spiking. Sham stimulation showed no effect. 3/
A big (unanswered) question in the TMS field is: Does it matter that we hit the "right spot" on the DLPFC to treat depression? Many believe that we need to hit nodes of anticorrelated connectivity in order to suppress aberrant sgACC activity, but we're not sure if that actually happens. 2/
New paper from @stanfordpntlab.bsky.social in collaboration with @coreykeller.bsky.social, @neuro-engineer.bsky.social, Nick Trapp, and Aaron Boes at UIowa! We explored how TMS to the DLPFC changes neural activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, a key mood regulator. 1/
Agreed it's concerning, but p-values shouldn't be considered in isolation. I'd much rather see p=0.048 from a well-motivated, well-controlled study than p=0.0001 from a study/test with a terrible control or inappropriate null model.
Thought I didn't click it, been getting a ton of spam anyway, figured I accidentally clicked it...now I'm not so sure again.
Fully agree!
Ezra Klein went beyond opposing political violence to extol Charlie Kirk for doing politics "exactly the right way," making up a fictional version of Kirk to praise.
That distortion, with its indulgence of bad faith, is a perfect illustration of the larger media failure that helps Trump.
My latest
From @coreykeller.bsky.social's amazing team, led by @chrisclineneuro.bsky.social: x.com/DrCoreyKelle...
Would love some insight into what has happened to @nytimes.com. Is a president embroiled in a child sex trafficking scandal with underwater poll numbers on a "winning streak"? Is Trump usually cool, calm, and collected, only now "displaying his volatile side"?
Even if you think these deals are worth the tarnished academic integrity and freedom (they're not), paying an extortion fee to get your grants back doesn't make much sense when the rest of the government is working hard to gut NIH/NSF/etc on a larger scale anyway.
Calling these outcomes 'deals' or 'agreements' is in the interest of both university administrators (who do not want to appear passive) and the White House (which does not want to appear authoritarian).
They are extortions—displays of power & dominance designed to coerce all universities watching.
I'm here, would be great to catch up!
Understandably so, given it's easier to operationalize sensation than it is something more integrative, global, and context-dependent like emotions.
Introspection isn't useless, but e.g. introspection did not teach us how the visual system worked and I'd argue if we had clung to introspection too tightly we'd still not understand vision as well as we do. Something like that might be happening with emotion research.
The underlying idea here I agree with is that hypotheses about emotions are at high risk of being framed more by introspection on the part of the researchers than prior objective evidence (but they'll go to great lengths to convince you -- and themselves! -- otherwise).
My favorite is PCR, which essentially underlies the entire trillion-dollar biotech industry. It grew out of (NSF funded) research on bacteria living in Yellowstone hot springs!
Wait, most blue state universities don't say anything publicly either! (At least in an institutional capacity.)
“No Kings” demonstration, Ocean Beach, San Francisco
