Jean Maines

Opinions my own. Retweets are not endorsements.

[Matt Beynon @mattbeynon]

What could go wrong 🤷🏻‍♂️

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Imagine if Congress said this decades ago about nuclear energy or complex pharmaceuticals. What a dumb transparently pro-industry cop out.

[kyama @kyamawebb23]

Having all of our military bases in the Middle East destroyed feels like it should be a bigger deal then Benghazi.

[John Hagner @JHagner]

A political party coalescing behind the VP of an unpopular administration with lousy national poll numbers, because maintaining internal coalition hierarchy is more valuable to elite political actors than maximizing the likelihood of victory? First I’m hearing of it.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A woman one month into a new job at the FDA was handed an application to approve a sleeping pill. It looked routine. They gave it to her because she was new and it seemed like an easy one to start on.

She read the file and something was missing. No evidence at all that the drug was safe in pregnancy, and it was being sold as a remedy for morning sickness. The drug was thalidomide, and West Germany was getting through a million doses a day.

Frances Kelsey asked for more data. The company sent representatives to her office, then telephoned her at all hours, then went over her head to her supervisors. Between them they contacted her and her boss around fifty separate times. She later said most of what they called her could not be printed. Ten million tablets were already sitting in warehouses waiting for her signature.

She said no six times. And while she held the line, doctors in Germany and Australia were piecing together what was happening to babies whose mothers had taken it. Limbs that had never formed, hands and feet attached directly at the shoulder and hip, in at least 4,000 children across Europe. The company withdrew its American application in 1962.

Seventeen cases turned up in the United States, all from free samples doctors had handed out before any approval. Without her it would have been thousands.

Congress passed a new law that same year requiring companies to prove a drug is both safe and effective, and requiring informed consent from anyone in a trial. Those rules are now used worldwide. Kennedy gave her the highest civilian award in the country and she was the second woman ever to receive it. She stayed at the FDA another 45 years and died in 2015 at 101.

Every American woman handed a pill in pregnancy is downstream of one woman refusing to sign a form six times while men shouted at her.

https://t.co/Xx4rbkh2gH

[MapQuest @MapQuest]

We're not changing the name of Lake Ontario. Name it whatever you want at your leisure: https://t.co/E2I0Ezd57W

(tag us so we can see your work 🙂)

[Conor Friedersdorf @conor64]

The whole party owns the nonsense. It's so embarrassing. Imagine going off to Washington for the first time with aspirations of helping your country... and then one day your job turns out to be making this social media post.

[Aaron Parnas @AaronParnas]

I totally envision Trump renaming the San Andreas Fault to Joe Biden’s Fault, and I am just putting this out there so I can say I predicted it one day.

[Jean Maines @JeanMaines]

What could possibly go wrong?

[City Journal @CityJournal]

Texas has more planned data-center capacity than any other state by far.

ERCOT says it is considering more than 474 gigawatts of grid-connection requests from large users—more than five times its all-time peak demand, and nearly all of it coming from proposed data centers.

[Adam Serwer 🍝 @AdamSerwer]

Bootstraps for you, bailouts for me

[Anne Carpenter, PhD @DrAnneCarpenter]

March 15 deadline for undergrads!
Contact any NIH-funded professor (NIGMS specifically) and see if they are eligible to apply for a supplement to fund you to do paid summer research with them!

https://t.co/D02YAbBCB4

[Prof Lennart Nacke, PhD @acagamic]

Since COVID-19 hit, I have digested 100+ podcasts.

Most of them weren't really helpful for academics.

Save yourself the time & just check out the following: ↓🎓

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Bacteria replicate DNA at crazy speeds & accuracy. 💨

If DNA polymerase was a USPS truck, and each home was a single nucleotide:

This truck would deliver to every home in the U.S. in 65 hours. It would do this about 4 times without making a single mistake.

[National Center for Science Education @NCSE]

"As our lineage evolved, at least 155 human genes sprung up from DNA regions previously thought of as 'junk,' including two human-specific genes that emerged since humans branched off from chimpanzees around 4 to 6 million years ago."

#Evolution #SciComm
https://t.co/W20fPEwIAn

[Scientific American @sciam]

A way to map the ancestry of dog breeds reveals the genetic basis of stereotypical dog behaviors https://t.co/FkT5R8fMgN

[Derenic Byrd @DerenicByrd]

White people can identify 500 breeds of dogs but will mix up 2 black coworkers.

[National Center for Science Education @NCSE]

ICYMI: Svante Pääbo's Nobel Prize lecture on "The Neandertal Genome and the Evolution of Modern Humans."

#SciChat #SciComm
https://t.co/aXbHMamP2O

[WeRateDogs @dog_rates]

This is Mohu. She just got a fresh haircut and is really feeling herself. Nothing makes her more confident than being completely round. 13/10

[Steven Salzberg 💙💛 @StevenSalzberg1]

Some good news in the vaccine world: a realistic, entirely feasible universal flu vaccine. Now if only we don't have to wait for a random private company to start manufacturing it... https://t.co/4bLDoVKqxY