Adrian Liston

🇦🇺🇧🇪🇬🇧👨‍🔬🌈 Professor of Pathology & Head of Immunology at @Cambridge_Uni. Fellow & Welfare Tutor at @Catz_Cambridge. Founder & CSO at Aila Biotech.

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

Two post-doc positions available in our lab!

It is a supportive environment and one which boosts careers! Historically, of our ~30 post-docs 27% have gone on to tenure-track positions, 27% did another post-doc, and 42% have gone on to positions in biotech or pharma.

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

@___il_______ @Toothache01 @snezanalawrence Oh, it makes a huge difference. In the private defence you can, and do, send students back to do more work, if it wasn't of standard. In the public defence, in front of friends and family, you give them a chance to showcase their knowledge, with enough difficulty to look tough.

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

@Toothache01 @snezanalawrence I prefer the Belgian system out of these. It could be improved, but it provides a quality control step and a celebration step. The UK system is poor at both.

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

I don't like how PhD defences are done in the UK. It is an ordeal without actually being a quality control step.

[Mohamed Sabba @ma_sabba]

Funny story from Southampton: someone had a PhD viva which was so long they had to take multiple breaks for lunch, dinner, and tea.

Eventually everyone was kicked out by security at midnight, and they decided to give the poor student a PhD for his trouble.

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

@ma_sabba This is really quite unreasonable. A cap of three hours would be better. If there are many issues to raise, the jury can simply prioritise the most important. I'd be raising a complaint if one of my students was treated like this.

[Jeffrey Modell Foundation (JMF) @Info4PI]

Today, we’re celebrating Jeffrey. 💙

A little boy whose life was far too short, but whose story changed the lives of countless others around the world.

Because of Jeffrey, families have greater awareness of primary immunodeficiency. Because of Jeffrey, babies around the world have the opportunity to be identified through newborn screening before they become seriously ill. And because of Jeffrey, children and families facing primary immunodeficiency have a community that continues to advocate for them.

His legacy lives on in every diagnosis made earlier, every family given answers, and every child given a chance.

Happy Birthday, Jeffrey. Your story continues to make a difference every single day. 💙

#ScreenEveryBaby

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

I just had to show off my latest purchase - the only water bottle around for lovers of lymph!

https://t.co/bPnfn9U84H

[Zielinski lab @zielinski_cz]

A great opening of our Immune Alliance Meeting 2026 in Bayreuth with Nobel Laureate Shimon Sakaguchi presenting his latest work on the role of Treg cells in cancer immunity. #immunology

[Roychoudhuri Lab @RoychoudhuriLab]

The convergence on PRDX1 from this study and ours using completely different methodologies is remarkable! https://t.co/2lsp4ZKreB

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

We have a new book, and it is a cute one!

"Cell Mates" is the alphabet book all #immunology parents need!

https://t.co/IeT0Oed0EI

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

@g_quietsky74 If it improves vaccine uptake, the whole community benefits :)

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

We have a new book, and it is a cute one!

"Cell Mates" is the alphabet book all #immunology parents need!

https://t.co/IeT0Oed0EI

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

@Lucam38a @NHSMillion I guessed you missed the >1 million British employees in the figure? It was right at the top

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

And look, I know what you are going to say. "That Regulatory T cell is too cute! I need it on a mug!" So I am happy to also introduce the merch over at Etsy

https://t.co/HeEBKG4CWU

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

@DrTregoning It's a functional protocol! There is no need to troubleshoot it further - perfectly reasonable stance.

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

Silly take. Optimising every step is unnecessary. Applying prior principles, getting a functional protocol, and then sticking to it without needlessly troubleshooting is a perfectly scientific approach.

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Bunsen burners don’t reduce contamination. It was all an illusion. My biology teacher was wrong.

This isn’t surprising, though. So much of biology, and the way we do experiments, claims to be “scientific” but is actually swaddled in mysticism.

Just walk into a laboratory and watch biologists for a day; they will do all sorts of weird rituals that — if you ask them to explain — will elicit no answer other than, “Well, that’s the way I was taught to do it.” Why are washes always five minutes long, for example? Why are they always done in groups of three? Did anybody actually ever measure this stuff?

The Bunsen burner wasn’t even invented for its modern use. Robert Bunsen, a German chemist, invented it in the 1850s to heat up his chemical reactions. Microbiologists later used it to flame and sterilize instruments, which makes sense. And then there was all this debate and controversy about Pasteur’s swan-neck flasks, and this idea that microbes were floating in the air and contaminating things, and so microbiologists decided to take the Bunsen burners they had used to sterilize instruments and just …. put the open flames on their benches to sterilize the air. But this was pure mysticism. Nobody ever actually studied whether or not this worked.

Someone ought to open up a lab and raise money to run “mysticism experiments.” Like, how bad is it (really) if we don’t wash things for five minutes in three cycles? How bad would it be if we didn’t incubate with antibodies at 4 degrees Celsius overnight? Why do cells eventually saturate in LB media? (Some people argue it’s because they run out of carbon, but others claim that's totally a lie and it's actually the magnesium.)

Much of experiment is tacit illusion.

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

Huge if true

[Arjun Raj @arjunrajlab]

I've heard a rumor that someone has solved the figures-jumping-around-in-a-Word-doc problem…

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

"The Professor, The Pipette, and the Path Not Taken" has readers choosing to work in research, developing spin-out companies, becoming a professor or leave science altogether. The hundreds of paths through the book lead to a range of alternative endings.

https://t.co/LZ3nYyv9Pe

[Roychoudhuri Lab @RoychoudhuriLab]

Delighted to share new work published in @ScienceMagazine entitled 'Tumor-derived antioxidants suppress immunity by depriving T cells of reactive oxygen species,' led by @XanWesolowski in the lab https://t.co/Urzw44VngI

[Trades Union Congress @The_TUC]

Boss making you resign to save himself?

Join a union.

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

@DrTregoning I had dinner with a science historian who said he put together the actual chronology of events by reading student progress reports. And here I was thinking no one ever read those!

[Adrian Liston @LabListon]

I've also seen plenty of times where the directed hypothesis and validation came first, then 'omics was done and thrown in to be the first figure of a paper. Trying to work out the history of science from published papers is problematic!

[Amit Kumar Yadav @theoneamit]

That's the popular opinion from what I routinely hear. Discrediting omics is fashionable. Poorly done omics is also routine. we credit all success to final validation (mol bio techniques) instead of omics that helped generate the hypothesis and claim victory.