Alistair Forrest

Head of Systems Biology and Genomics Lab @PerkinsComms
Visiting Scientist @riken_en
#FANTOM5 #transcriptomics

[Alistair Forrest @Al__Forrest]

@ruselusalbus Was great to see you!

[Human Cell Atlas @humancellatlas]

We had a great turn out for the Early and Mid Career Researcher (EMCR) Sessions this morning, before the main programme of the 2026 HCA Asia Meeting started. Thanks to everyone who participated.
#HCA2026Asia

[Joe Sabatino @jsabatino37]

General prediction of T cell receptor antigen specificity from sequence using AlphaFold 3

https://t.co/LlJNILQjYO

[Ruslan Rust @rust_ruslan]

Lots of debate this week on whether journals should ban AI in peer review.

We actually tested this in our new preprint, and the results were pretty clear to me.

For context, I've reviewed for most of the big journals and evaluated 1,000 human reviews as an editor. I love to read and evaluate science.

TLDR: From now on I won't do any peer review without AI. For clinical trials, I'd even call human-only review dangerous 🧵

[PNASNews @PNASNews]

A study of articles suspected of being associated with “paper mills”in the field of molecular cancer shows the papers cite other paper mill papers to inflate their metrics. These practices can amplify unreliable findings and slow scientific progress. https://t.co/CFC9ytCkoQ

[Alistair Forrest @Al__Forrest]

@molivarina @Nature Congratulations!

[R U OK? @ruokanyday]

You don’t always see the load someone’s carrying.

If you’re thinking of reaching out, trust that instinct, it could open the door to a conversation they really need.

#ruokanyday

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Alistair Forrest @Al__Forrest]

Last chance to register and join us for HCA Asia. It's looking like an awesome set of speakers and posters!

Also join in the Breakout session discussions on the next phase of HCA!

[Human Cell Atlas @humancellatlas]

Three weeks to go until the 2026 Asia Meeting in Perth, Australia on 2-4 November. Come and hear updates from the various HCA Regional Networks and join the panel discussion on diversity and equitable science. Register now at https://t.co/S5fEO9SZjS
#HCA2026Asia #Genomics

[David Pocock @DavidPocock]

Each year, we will lose 1000 women to ovarian cancer. Tragically, 70% of women will be diagnosed in the late stages. It is the deadliest women’s cancer in this county.

Despite this, we invest very, very little in the research that could help develop the new diagnostic test or a new treatment.

I’m standing with patients, researchers and doctors to call for $20m to be invested each year in research. We have billions of $ in our Medical Research Future Fund that can and should be put to work.

I believe this is what Australians want us to spend money on; to provide hope for the women that will be diagnosed today and tomorrow.
https://t.co/N1O8wPixR9

[Human Cell Atlas @humancellatlas]

Are you attending the 2026 HCA Asia Meeting, in Perth, Australia? @10xGenomics, the exclusive Foundational Sponsor of the #HCA2026Asia Meeting is hosting a pre-conference workshop on 2 November. Please Indicate interest at https://t.co/A39of4Uor2
#SingleCell #SpatialTechnology

[Malika 🧬 @malikules]

mandatory lab training slides in 2026

[Alexandr Rakitko @AlexRakitko]

GWAS have identified many genetic variants linked to adult facial features. But we still face a major interpretation problem because there is a black box between a genetic variant and the actual shape of the nose, jaw or other parts of the face. 🧬👃🏻👂🏻
A new @NatureGenet study tries to open this box. The authors studied human facial development from about week 6 to week 11 and combined RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, spatial transcriptomics and micro-CT. This shows which genes are active, which regulatory regions are open, where this happens and at what stage of development.
For some GWAS variants, they could now reconstruct the path from variant to phenotype. A variant sits in an enhancer that becomes active in a specific cell type, place and developmental window. This changes the activity of a nearby developmental gene and can ultimately affect a specific facial feature.
PAX1 is a nice example. Breaking the whole gene causes severe defects. But enhancers provide much finer control by tuning the same gene only in the right tissue and at the right time. Disrupting one such enhancer in mice changed skull shape without producing the full PAX1 knockout phenotype.
The most surprising result is about nerves. They may not simply connect to an already formed face. Peripheral nerves seem to help fine tune the shape of the facial skeleton during development.
This is the real power of multimodal studies. A GWAS SNP alone is just an association. But when genetics, chromatin, gene expression, spatial information and anatomy are seen together, the path from DNA to a visible human trait starts to become clear.

https://t.co/IxtcKtUKkI

#GWAS #Multiomics #scRNA #face

[Alistair Forrest @Al__Forrest]

@adameykolab Very cool, and see a lot of familiar names!

[Igor Adameyko @adameykolab]

Research Briefings about our paper in Nature Genetics: https://t.co/8rzSPziNbm.

[Rintaro Fujimoto @RintaroFujimoto]

I'm happy to share our paper @NatureGenet — the first East Asian and large-scale multi-ancestry GWAS for multiple sclerosis! Integration with single-cell/spatial transcriptomics reveals the cell-type- and context-specificity underlying MS genetic risk.🧠🧬
https://t.co/jx92Z0IqLV

[Alistair Forrest @Al__Forrest]

Explore #Genetics and #GeneticDisease at #HCA2026Asia.

@jyang1981, @seyhanyazar, @drneavin, @anglixue, Ying Ying Wong & Jingjing Wang.

🧬 Genetic variation • Ancestry • Gene regulation • Immunogenomics • Disease risk • Deep learning

Register now: https://t.co/vtshuSQm14

[Alistair Forrest @Al__Forrest]

Explore Atlasing at #HCA2026Asia.

@ry_lister, Yun Xia, Partha Majumder, Bryony Nayagam, James Timmons & @yadacchable.

🧬 Ageing • Human tissue atlases • Environmental exposures • Spatial transcriptomics • Epitranscriptomics

Register now: https://t.co/vtshuSQm14

[Alistair Forrest @Al__Forrest]

Explore #Cancer research at #HCA2026Asia.

Ruby Huang, @WoongYangPark2, Kamran Khan, Natini Jinawath, Elaine Yiqun Cao & Anjaney Pandey.

🧬 Spatial multi-omics • Clonal evolution • Tumour microenvironment • Treatment resistance

Register now: https://t.co/vtshuSQm14

[Alistair Forrest @Al__Forrest]

Explore #ComputationalBiology and #AI at #HCA2026Asia.

@em6wong, Davis McCarthy, @TheEllisPatrick, Jong-Eun Park, @steman_research & Guangdun Peng.

🧬 Spatial analysis • Graph neural nets • Cell-state dynamics • Immune ageing

Register now: https://t.co/vtshuSQm14