@MichaelLinLab
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Stanford Neurobiology and Bioengineering Precision molecular design / synbiochem. Also @michaelzlin
Greenberg → Tsien →
Joined July 2022
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Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Journals can’t find peer reviewers. Preprints aren’t taken seriously. Garbage papers slip through peer review. Meantime, AI is slowly taking over.
This situation is getting worse & worse:
1. Reviewers are overloaded. Fatigue is epidemic. Few scientists have time for it. As a result, manuscript turnaround times become unpredictable and painfully slow.
2. Grant proposals demand massive peer review too. They push the system even further.
3. Review quality is decreasing. Rigor is inconsistent. Technical aspects are poorly assessed.
4. Bias in peer review is real. W all know how manuscripts are rejected due to competition & jealousy. It causes a growing dissatisfaction among scientists.
❗️ PAID PEER REVIEW is a possible solution.
The best example I know is this:
Prof. Dan Gorelick pays $280 per review.
He’s the editor-in-chief of Biology Open. It’s a not-for-profit community-oriented journal. Made by real scientists. Well-known in the field.
They showed that time to editorial decisions drops HUGELY:
- Unpaid reviews: 38 days.
- Paid reviews: 5-6 days.
__
I talked to Dan about why he dislikes unpaid peer review, publication fees (esp. at Nature), how AI can review papers, and so on. This is just WILD:
youtu.be/33nR98C0pEI
At last, there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
__
We're searching for an assistant/associate professor in Bioengineering at Stanford!
If you're using cutting-edge engineering approaches to understand or control biological systems in useful ways (medical, environmental, etc), we'd love to hear from you!
facultypositions.stanford.ed…
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
One of the worst phenotypes among scientists is what I call "Figure 1 people." These are often smart young scientists who do some work in the lab, and then get incredibly excited by the very first thing they find - but then think they're done... when they've actually just started
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Cornell just produced a massive new report on higher education noting that companies have a “jarring” skepticism of higher ed thanks to a new generation of degree holders who lack key skills like handling uncertainty, compromising, and absorbing feedback.
Faculty also report that incoming students, despite four years of undergraduate education, are “underdeveloped” in these relational or interpersonal skills.
This is a serious crises in higher education and the report calls for a greater need for conflict-resolution training. We need to do a better job training our students to deal with these issues.
These are traditionally the skills students developed in higher education. I loved college because it challenged me, sparked debate, and required me to grapple with complexity. This should be an essential part of college--inside and outside the classroom.
chronicle.com/article/compan…
Much too simplistic to say "simply"
In chem bio we see a lot of reinventing of wheels made by biochemists (the same thing) decades ago. Being aware avoids repetitive work later confined to low-visibility journals. Maybe having experience + new ideas in the same lab is useful
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Here’s a short summary of our recent #xenocortication article in @Nature, including the rationale, approach, key findings, initial applications to disease modeling, and current limitations.
A tremendous effort led by Konstantin Kaganovsky, Kevin Kelley, Tilo Gschwind, and Paul Harary.
Link to the article below
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
AI just killed the peer-review. No one reads the papers anymore. Neither reviewers nor editors. It is impossible address issues raised by the AI. They find something wrong in every round of revisions and papers get rejected eventually. This is killing the science itself.
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Alzheimer’s disease has long been seen as a tale of two proteins: beta amyloid, which forms sticky plaques in the brain, and tau, which in its diseased state creates tangles inside neurons.
Antibodies that clear beta amyloid have been approved to treat Alzheimer’s, but it was tau that made headlines earlier this year: Researchers shared results from a phase 2 trial testing diranersen, a drug developed by Biogen to lower the body’s production of tau, in more than 400 patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s.
On the study’s main measure of cognition, participants getting diranersen saw as much as a 26% slowing of decline—about on par with the effect seen in earlier trials of approved antiamyloid drugs.
Although the presentation sparked enthusiasm, it also drew attention to puzzling aspects of the trial results. Patients taking the lowest of three possible doses saw the greatest benefit, which caused the trial to fall short of the dose-dependent effect the investigators had chosen as its primary endpoint. And some people in the higher dose groups experienced a potentially worrisome side effect—a “confusional state” lasting up to a week after diranersen was administered.
Learn more on #WorldAlzheimersDay: scim.ag/4pnnDCQ
ALT Alzheimer’s trial results lend momentum to strategies targeting tau
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
NEW: Reed Jobs, a prominent biotech investor (and son of another Jobs you may have heard of), calls for a doubling of the NIH budget to $100 billion. Via @statnews
statnews.com/2026/09/21/nih-…
"A connectome often does not… constrain the dynamics of recurrent networks, illustrating the difficulty of inferring function from connectivity alone. However, recordings from a small subset of neurons can remove this degeneracy"
And that's why you need voltage indicators folks
Prediction of neural activity in connectome-constrained recurrent networks
nature.com/articles/s41593-0…
Summary:
Modern neuroscience can now map the connectome—the detailed wiring diagram of large neural circuits and even entire brains. But this study asks an important question: Does knowing the wiring alone tell us how the brain functions?
The authors developed a connectome-constrained neural network framework. A “teacher” network represents the real neural system, while a “student” network has the same connectivity and synaptic weights, but different unknown biophysical properties, such as neuronal and synaptic parameters.
The key finding is that connectivity alone often does not sufficiently constrain neural dynamics. Many different patterns of neural activity can arise from the same wiring diagram when the underlying biophysical parameters are uncertain.
However, recording activity from even a small number of strategically selected neurons can greatly reduce this uncertainty. These recordings help constrain the student network so that its dynamics more closely match those of the teacher.
Getting a lot of attention now is this very intriguing result in sleep research: Activation of rare long-range SST-Chodl inhibitory neurons in the cortex is sufficient to promote sleep.
But: The study is incomplete in a very important way, surprisingly
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
That said, I hope it turns out that SST-Chodl cells are necessary and sufficient for sleep. Just as having knobs for a car's audio and heating makes those easier to control, having distinct neurons for specific neurological functions allows for more targeted therapeutics.
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Excellent summary of the state of the art of brain decoding by Theres Luethi @theresluethi gesda.global/the-last-privat…
