Comparative Genomics #glioma; #aneuploidy #evolution 🧑💻 🧬 | ❤️ 😋 🥘🧑🍳 📷 | @YaleMed | Views = own | ❤️ 🔄 ≠ endorsement.
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Joined January 2007
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There are people who leave a mark on the world, and then there are people who change it entirely. Steve changed the world and so many lives in the process. He certainly changed my life forever. His spirit lives on in everything he created and everyone he inspired.
ALT A photo of Steve looking at the camera wearing glasses and a black turtleneck.
At last, finally optogenetics gets the prize 😎 If @NobelPrize has a room for more, Gero Miesenböck should have shared this one.
To understand how the brain forms memories, feelings and behaviours has long been a dream for researchers.
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel have been awarded the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries leading to optogenetics, which makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain.
This method is now being used in laboratories around the world to reveal the brain’s mysteries.
Samir Amin retweeted
Glad to announce our new preprint is available, exploring a novel combination of therapeutics against high grade IDHmut gliomas that are not candidates for IDHmut inhibitor therapies.
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Samir Amin retweeted
Three generation of Bohr's in one frame✍️
Niels Bohr (left) – along with his son Aage Bohr (center) – and his grandson Tomas Bohr (bottom) – currently Professor of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
Samir Amin retweeted
The Jackson Laboratory is a wonderful, collaborative place to pursue basic & translational science. On the faculty job market? I strongly encourage you to consider joining us in Bar Harbor, Maine!
Apply: go.jax.org/276n55
#JAXresearch #JAXstemcellsdev
Samir Amin retweeted
A few thoughts on this:
1) If you’ve only seen clips of this interview, I’d encourage you to watch the full podcast. I push back on plenty of AI hype in it.
2) As I said in the podcast, this example is academic. My intention was to illustrate how hard it is to make absolute guarantees about isolation, which is why it's important to have layers of defense. The part before the clip starts is me talking about other layers of defense.
3) The example I'm bringing up isn't about weight exfiltration via temperature sensors, it's about coordination between agents that are supposed to be fully isolated and independent. Coordination can require very few bits of information.
4) One lesson from the HF incident is that we put too much trust in sandbox isolation and didn't have enough independent safeguards. Airgapping is an extremely strong safeguard. When designing safety protocols, I think it's much better to overestimate rather than underestimate.
OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change
"But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in a situation again where we underestimate the AI. It's a weird world, because AI progress is so fast that people are consistently underestimating the AI."
"So to be in a situation where you don't underestimate it again, when it comes to safety and alignment, you have to have a very, very, very high bar."
"You could even go as far as to say, "Well, we should air gap the computers." And I'm not convinced that that would be sufficient."
"There are studies, and this is mostly academic, where you can have two computers next to each other that are air-gapped and they're still able to communicate with each other because they have temperature sensors."
"One of them is able to run their CPU really hot, and then the other one can actually detect the temperature change, and then that actually gives them a mechanism to communicate."
_________
Link and more key quotes from OpenAI's safety related conversations: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
Samir Amin retweeted
What can we learn about a single rare variant?
Published today in Science: the @23andMeResearch Institute and Dana-Farber studied the EGFR T790M in 11M 23andMe research participants. The variant has OR = 25.2 for lung cancer, rising to 61.7 in never-smokers(!). 🧵
On usefulness of variant impact scores:
nitter.cf/StevenSalzberg1/status… vs 👇
2cents: Both, please use substack or blog 😉 🙏
Ever wonder how heterogeneity defines bladder cancer subtypes?
Ha and Hsieh Lab postdoctoral fellows @pushpa_itagi and Samantha Schuster @fredhutch did, leading to a deep study of bladder cancer clonality, evolution, and heterogeneity published @Nature
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Samir Amin retweeted
How did we come to understand cancer in the light of evolutionary theory?
Nothing makes sense if not with population genetics!
In our latest @NatureRevCancer review we unpack how population genetics theory applied to somatic cells allows us to measure and predict cancer evolution from molecular data.
Computational modelling in oncology has gone a long way but we need to go much further.
The frontier is combining evolutionary theory with machine learning.
Link below👇
💎 Building a genomic language model using first principles of evolutionary biology
We are thrilled to share that our GPN-Star manuscript is now published and freely available:
doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-1…
(1/n)
Samir Amin retweeted
Terence Tao spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study - no teaching, no random events of committees, just unlimited time to think. But after a few months, he ran out of ideas.
Terence thinks that mathematicians and scientists need a certain level of randomness and inefficiency to come up with new ideas.
Samir Amin retweeted
We’re launching AlphaGenome Atlas: an AI-powered searchable database mapping the predicted impact of all 9 billion possible single-letter DNA changes.
Here’s how it could help researchers better understand our biology 🧵
Claims and debate aside, Navier Stokes is one of most elegant equations out here: 💎by
@eigensteve
youtu.be/mDt-HJEXK6g?is=Z_WQ…
and @vcubingx
youtu.be/Ra7aQlenTb8?is=OlPk…
Great pointers, also applicable in general. @vkhosla
youtube.com/watch?v=9SX0b15L…
Recommend watching @vkhosla’s latest talk on company building. Some very useful constructs
• Hardest founder job is deciding whose judgment to trust on which topic.
• There’s a difference between a $0M company and a $0B company. It’s reflected in the mindset, first 10 hires, how you talk about yourself, whether you actually think big.
• The way to think about burn is like driving a race car. When you see a curve, you want to brake as late as possible and as quick as you can. Ability to reduce burn quickly (e.g., marketing spend, contractors vs FTE) gives flexibility in experimenting
• Obstinate on vision, flexible on tactics. Zigzag to Everest. Don’t take the fast-revenue side trail if it isn’t the mountain.
• Waste some money on purpose. Test assumptions you don’t know are assumptions. Square Cash was “waste” and became huge.
* Organized chaos > perfect management early.
• Hire for the risks in the business, not just open roles. Experts often know the previous version of the world; large innovations rarely come from people who “knew the industry.” First 10 hires hire the next 500.
• Survive long enough to give luck a chance. 3 things you control, 3 your competitors control, 4 are luck.
Two good takes on a recent phase 3 failure targeting LP(a) and what's ahead for ASCVD treatment.
1. @skathire nitter.cf/skathire/status/188528…
2. @EricTopol nitter.cf/EricTopol/status/20966…
"Shocking"
These were the headlines for two very large, pivotal drug trials to reduce heart disease.
But what is really going on?
erictopol.substack.com/p/the…
Samir Amin retweeted
Most of the produce aisle exists thanks to genome duplication events.
quantamagazine.org/genome-du…
A very good one @dwarkesh_sp on what went wrong inside OpenAI-HF saga.
On balancing a solid pretraining versus generalization by @ajeya_cotra
youtu.be/X50zezLFWWI?si=Capl…
