Cofounder and Senior Fellow at Foresight Institute @foresightinst, with an interest in longevity and life extension. Coauthor of Gaming the Future (2022).
Palo Alto, California, USA
Joined July 2009
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Hmm maybe there’s a reason why so many educated people with options still want to immigrate to the U.S.
Typical reaction in science to new ideas
When Michael Levin (@drmichaellevin) planned to change the voltage of embryo cells, someone wrote to his postdoc mentor saying he’d had a mental breakdown. Membrane voltage was thought to be mere housekeeping. Then a graduate student found the embryos covered in black dots. They were eyes.
Full episode: youtu.be/c8iFtaltX-s
Christine Peterson retweeted
Let me fix that tweet for you:
1. The people rioting in Paris are criminals who are committing crimes.
2. Destroying hard-working people’s businesses is evil and not a valid form of protest.
From the high schools of France to the streets of Madrid to the universities of Tirana, young people are telling their governments the same thing: in an age of massive wealth inequality, they want a future they can believe in.
In France, students and teachers are asking for safe schools, enough teachers and smaller classes.
In Spain, for affordable rent and housing.
In Albania, for good jobs and an end to corruption.
@JDVance says this is what happens when a nation lets in too many immigrants from the global south.
He is not just morally wrong, but misreading the moment.
The is what happens when nations let wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few.
This is what happens when young people lose hope in their future.
In America, let us listen to our young.
We need an economic and political transformation.
America's Next New Deal.
Christine Peterson retweeted
People aren't psychologically or emotionally prepared for just how smoothly biotech and biology in general will become nanotech, programmable matter, living things interoperable with the machine world.
Can we design proteins that cut other proteins? Our de novo cysteine protease paper is out in Nature! We designed new folds that cleave peptide backbones, with activity demonstrated in mammalian cells. Paper and code 👇
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Accountability for them all, hear hear! @MIT
Christine Peterson retweeted
The broader conclusion is that MIT and its administrators were not truthful about their actions and cannot distance themselves from the unlawful conduct that caused the damage.
The tortious interference claims, proven through a unanimous verdict from a majority-female jury, make this even clearer. The jury awarded the majority of the damages on those claims, finding that Knouse unlawfully interfered with David Sabatini’s employment and prospective jobs. This further established a causal connection between her conduct and the destruction of his livelihood.
The implication is that Knouse’s conduct drove the loss of his lab, his job, and future opportunities, rather than those losses occurring for unrelated reasons arising from a so-called "independent” and opaque investigation or MIT’s purported findings about his lab environment. That is the basis for calling MIT’s public explanation dishonest.
It is a repudiation of the dirty tactics universities use to take out faculty they don’t like while claiming to be fair and objective. This should prompt a further reckoning with the lack of trustworthiness in our academic institutions.
MIT claimed that its actions against David were based on findings about the culture in his lab. The $6M verdict invalidates that explanation.
The jury awarded David $6M for damages caused by Knouse’s defamation. This means not only that false statements were made, but that those statements were proven to have caused a huge amount of damage. A causal connection between Knouse’s statements and the harm David suffered was established in court. The damage he endured came from the actions of MIT, Whitehead, and HHMI and their authority over him.
The implication of the court ruling is that those actions occurred because of the false statements, rather than for other reasons such as a vaguely defined lab culture.
A “toxic work environment” is a vague, slippery, often unfalsifiable slur that can be attached to anyone directing a laboratory or any group of people. Falling back on that label was a way to hide the real reasons for their actions from the public and look good to their base. Nobody likes an abusive boss, especially students who like to protest.
But I knew so many people who had worked under his supervision. They did not see him or his lab that way, even though they were not speaking publicly.
Faster please
harvard just hosted a longevity conference and the slides were unusual
- lilly: 72 weeks of tirzepatide slowed 26 epigenetic clocks (sub-study)
- novartis: now has a department for diseases of aging
- cder: aging and longevity going into its upcoming regulatory priorities doc
- church: pig organs with 69 edits are in FDA-cleared trials
- one investor called glp-1s the "first longevity medicine"
we'll look back at october 2026 as the month longevity stopped being niche.
Christine Peterson retweeted
The denial of what has happened with the Covid vaccines and continues to happen is just insane.
Clotting disorder new claims in UK from our 2023 study👇. Do we know for sure in this anecdotal story?…no but the fact that the authorities won’t even look at signals and data is despicable. phinancetechnologies.com/Hum…
“I don’t know what caused the blood clot in his leg, but I know it definitely wasn’t an experimental gene product that causes coagulopathies”
#flyeaglesfly
sports.yahoo.com/nfl/breakin…
Agree. High costs on the accuser. And those who handled this whole thing so very badly. Ditto many other similar cases
The case of Professor David Sabatini stands as one of the most egregious examples of woke institutional excess, and its fallout extended far beyond the destruction of a single career.
At the Whitehead Institute at MIT, he ran a roughly 40-person lab conducting important work in molecular biology and cell signaling. That research was abruptly terminated, costing numerous students and trainees their ongoing projects and career momentum and resulting in an untold loss of medically significant knowledge - knowledge that had been funded by the public’s taxpayer dollars.
All of that was abruptly canceled when a false accusation of sexual impropriety was taken up by MIT's DEI-infected bureaucracy and a director who was on a feminist crusade to purge a leading scientist for what appears to be the crime of being a white male.
The court found that the relationship was consensual and the accusations that destroyed his career came only after he ended it and moved on romantically - buyer's remorse, in other words.
After five years of litigation, discovery and trial, a Boston jury has just awarded Professor David Sabatini $6 million in his defamation case against Kristin Knouse, finding that she defamed him and interfered with his career. The jury also rejected her counterclaims of coercion, harassment, and a hostile work environment.
But all of this is just the first step. Many people who were involved need to be held accountable. The institutions must make this right.
MIT, Whitehead, and HHMI still have questions to answer about their own handling. Investigations must look into the director of Whitehead who perpetrated this witch hunt. @NIH and @NSF should now act on the jury’s findings. Restore @DMSabatini's eligibility for federal grants. The institutional investigations that led to his removal and the later debarment effort were based on claims that a jury has now rejected as defamatory. There is no more reason to treat him as radioactive.
And last but not least, bless you, @BillAckman. When almost no one in science, academia, or media would touch this case, you acted and supported him, funding his new lab so that his important work on mTOR could continue. Thank you and Dafna at NYU for standing up publicly for due process when it was so costly. I knew many of his students and colleagues who could not speak out in support of him out of fear of retribution and professional ruin. Prof. Sabatini has said that you saved his life. It is not a hyperbolic statement.
Also, for every one of him, there are other men whose lives have been ruined this way. For things to change, high costs on the accuser must be imposed.
cc @DrJBhattacharya @regardthefrost
Christine Peterson retweeted
Participants arriving for our Smart TV Hackathon at @Northeastern University, with @FuluFoundation and @LudlowInstitute 💻
Opening panel with @GamersNexus at 12pm!
Stay tuned for findings... 👀
I signed up right away. Hope to see you all there!
omg new Cuties! Classified!! 📖🕯️🕰️
Come join the Avalon Exposition, a festival dedicated to the study of mankind. Happening Oct 30–Nov 1 at Lighthaven. Sat night includes a Halloween Gala.
🍊Cuties members get a special discount!
cuties.app/classifieds/avalo…
It's not wrong
Nation Of France Films Massive Campaign Ad For Republicans buff.ly/DCRfNc5
Very sad that Wikipedia has deteriorated like this
A handful of Wikipedia editors have rewritten the story of Covid’s origins to depict ‘lab leak’ as a racist conspiracy — despite the FBI, CIA, and leading scientists all stating they believe the virus likely came from a lab.
Here’s how they buried the truth @AshleyRindsberg👇
