Karīna Siliņa

Scientist, likes to cook with wine, sometimes adds it to the food too. Group leader at @ETH_DCHAB, field of cancer immunology. Previously @UZH_en, @lvuniversity

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

We've seen a lot of unexpected benefits of GLP-1 drugs beyond treatment for diabetes and obesity. But reduction in violent crimes?
https://t.co/IAatRHGNqW

[Edgars Rinkēvičs @edgarsrinkevics]

Today, Latvia commemorates the 85th anniversary of the mass deportation conducted by Stalin’s regime.

Families were deported to Siberia, imprisoned, or killed by NKVD.

We will never forget victims of the Communist genocide.

[Sholto David @addictedtoigno1]

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures", but their own internal data.

[National Geographic @NatGeo]

Wishing a Happy Birthday to Sir David Attenborough. Thank you for the knowledge, passion, and hope you’ve passed on to all of us.

Celebrate 100 years of Sir David Attenborough with Ocean with David Attenborough on @DisneyPlus and @hulu

[Adam C Palmer @ac_palmer]

Most ‘synergistic’ cancer drug combinations fail in the clinic.

Why?

A new paper revisits 100 years of drug combination research to understand the matters key to clinical success
https://t.co/pcWjCxrtbb
1/8

[Paulino Tallón de Lara MD, PhD @Paul_TdL]

I am really happy to announce that we are hiring a postdoc to work on how chromosomal instability changes the immune landscape in colorectal cancer. Interested candidates can contact me directly ([email protected]) 

https://t.co/3OhNlwWtaI

[Kalin Nonchev @nonchevk]

Most spatial omics pipelines force a choice: integrate across modalities or scale across patients.
🙅 We don't think you should have to pick.
Preprint: https://t.co/DbQ40TTtCe
Code: https://t.co/ptAVOUWxvu

[Protect Kamala Harris ✊ @DisavowTrump20]

This is Alex Pretti, a registered nurse and the man murdered by ICE today in Minneapolis protecting a fellow citizen from Trump’s thugs.

RETWEET to honor his life 💔

[Daniela Latorre @LatorreDanielaa]

🔬 We’re hiring again!

Looking for 1 #PhD student to join the #MSCA-DN TRANSCEND network 🧬

Project on unconventional #Tcells in #MultipleSclerosis with research exchanges in
🇩🇰 Eyer’s lab, Aarhus
🇳🇴 @victorgreiff’s lab, Oslo

⏳ Deadline: Feb 28

👉 https://t.co/0R0snxGKrx

[Dr Terry Simpson @drterrysimpson]

This claim is a masterclass in rhetorical fraud, delivered with confidence instead of evidence.

Let’s dismantle it carefully.

Suzanne Humphries asserts that early polio vaccines caused more polio than they prevented, that iron lungs merely “became ventilators,” and that modern transverse myelitis is “the same pathology as polio.”
Every part of this is false, misleading, or deliberately confused.

1. “Early vaccines caused more polio than they prevented”

This is a statistical lie by misclassification.

Before vaccination, polio paralyzed tens of thousands of children every year. After mass vaccination, paralytic polio collapsed to near zero worldwide. The tiny number of vaccine-associated paralytic polio cases (roughly 1 in 2–3 million doses with early oral vaccines) was openly documented, studied, and—crucially—orders of magnitude smaller than wild polio.

That’s why medicine abandoned OPV in wealthy countries and moved to IPV. That is science correcting itself—not hiding.

2. “The iron lung didn’t go away—it’s now called a ventilator”

This is historically illiterate.

Iron lungs existed because polio selectively destroyed the motor neurons that control breathing. When polio disappeared, so did wards full of paralyzed children encased in steel cylinders.

Ventilators did not replace iron lungs because polio “changed its name.”
They exist because modern medicine treats trauma, surgery, sepsis, ARDS, prematurity, anesthesia, and neurologic disease—conditions that existed before, during, and after polio.

If polio were still here, you’d know. Pediatric ICUs would be full of flaccid paralysis again. They are not.

3. “Transverse myelitis is the same pathology as polio”

This is biological nonsense.

Polio is a neurotropic enterovirus that destroys anterior horn motor neurons.
Transverse myelitis is an immune-mediated inflammatory condition affecting multiple spinal cord tracts, often with sensory loss, pain, and autonomic dysfunction—features not characteristic of polio.

Same organ ≠ same disease.
That’s like saying a heart attack is the same as myocarditis because both involve the heart.

4. The real tell

Notice the pattern:

No population data

No timelines

No epidemiology

No global eradication context

No explanation for why polio vanished everywhere vaccines were used

Instead, we get semantic tricks and category errors designed to frighten parents.

The bottom line

Polio didn’t disappear because we renamed it.
It disappeared because vaccination worked.

And the reason claims like this persist is not because they are brave truths—but because they rely on audiences who don’t know the history, the biology, or the math.

Fear is easy.
Evidence is harder.
Medicine chose evidence—and children stopped dying.

That’s the part they never want you to remember.

[alex rubinsteyn @iskander]

so rare for glamslop to actually get defeated

[Daniela Latorre @LatorreDanielaa]

📢 We are hiring!
2 #Postdoctoral Positions in #NeuroImmunology in my group at @MyUniSR , fully funded for 2 years.

@syis_ecr @y_efis @SanRaffaeleMI @SiicaI

Details below 👇

[Daniela Latorre @LatorreDanielaa]

We are hiring! 🔬
Join our Neuro-Immune Interactions Lab at @SanRaffaeleMI in Milan, as a Lab Technician. Exciting opportunity to work with human samples and cutting-edge immunology techniques!

📄 Details & apply: https://t.co/dJCSmaGeho

#NeuroImmunology #LabTechnician #Hiring

[Aaron Parnas @AaronParnas]

NEW: Epstein survivors release the most powerful PSA I have ever seen.

Make this go viral so every member of the House of Representatives sees it.

[Karīna Siliņa @_sila]

@caught_jus69935 @Dev_TrYde @MicrobiomDigest @sival84 @Koertjes @grok pls explain the colluding gang reference and the specific papers referred to here

[Ulf Kristersson @SwedishPM]

Dear Viktor,

I understand that there is an election campaign in your country, and that this time you are truly being challenged for power.

But we do not interfere in your election campaign, nor do we want to become part of it.

Sweden and the Swedish people have always been friends of Hungary and the Hungarian people, as you know. We were friends of Hungary before your government, during your government, and we will remain so after your government.

We remember when Hitler’s genocide of Jews struck Hungary, and how Sweden in 1944 sent diplomat Raoul Wallenberg on a special mission to Budapest, to save as many Hungarian lives as possible.

Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews survived because we provided them with provisional protective passports and citizenship here in Sweden. When the Soviet Union later invaded Hungary, Raoul Wallenberg was forcibly taken to Moscow and disappeared.

The Swedish diplomat died, but tens of thousands of Hungarian lives were saved. We would do it again.

We also remember when the Soviet Union brutally crushed your Hungarian struggle for democracy and freedom in 1956, and when Prime Minister Imre Nagy was later executed for his efforts to democratize the country.

When Russian tanks crushed the Hungarian freedom struggle, the Hungarian people pleaded with the UN and all Western powers for help. Almost no one listened.
But one country that showed deep solidarity with you was Sweden.

We opened our arms to your freedom fighters and dissidents. We allowed you to build exile opposition against Soviet communism here, despite our non-alignment. It was not without risk for us. But we did it anyway—because it was the right thing to do.

Today, over 40,000 people of Hungarian descent live in Sweden, many of whom are descendants of the Hungarian refugees who came here in connection with the 1956 uprising. They are a well-integrated immigrant group in our Swedish society.

Democratic states help each other, then and now. And they stand up against countries that try to oppress others.

That is why, just as in 1944 and 1956, we support democratic countries that Russian tanks try to overrun. Back then, it was about Hungary; today, it is about Ukraine. And if we do not act, it could be about another country tomorrow.

This is also why we often express concern about the developments in Hungary in recent years. Hungary ultimately regained its freedom, but freedom must also be defended.

That is why we question when you go to have coffee with the leader of the same country that crushed your compatriots’ freedom struggle in 1956 and that today attacks your neighbour, Ukraine.

Hungary and the West are not strengthened by closing the door to their European friends or by attacking each other and the very things that distinguish us from barbarism — democracy and the rule of law.

Let me conclude with some wise words from yourself in 2007:

“As kind of a new generation of the West, our message to those younger than we is to stick to a Western type Hungary, not to let Hungary be derailed from its Western path, and to love that Hungary is a Western type country, which means that we believe in the free will of people and in the mutual responsibility towards each other that we take upon us, which are inseparable parts of Western culture.

The oil might come from the east, but freedom always comes from the west. And democracy cannot be directed from above, it can only grow from the hearts of people and in this way create a viable, Hungarian life.”

Finally, I wish to convey Sweden’s respect for the Hungarian people, and to wish your country a free, peaceful, and successful election.

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

The last two northern white rhinos left a mother and a daughter i think about them all the time 🦏💔

[owl @owl_posting]

The time of day that immunotherapy is given seems to really, really matter. Why?

note:
a recent randomized study (quote given blow) presented at a major cancer conference found that giving immunotherapy in the morning instead of the evening led to a 2x higher survival rate. that's a ridiculously large clinical effect for virtually zero cost

maybe it’s wrong. or overstated. but the study was randomized, and it lines up with what’s been consistently reported in retrospective studies over the last 6~ years, across thousands of patients and multiple cancer types

but the standard of care for immunotherapy still doesn’t account for timing, or so-called chronoimmunotherapy.

so, is this real? and if so, why would it matter, especially for an immunotherapy (checkpoint inhibitors) that has a bloodstream half-life measured in weeks? what's going on?

i don’t know. i don’t think anyone does. but i tried to poke at the question in this essay: https://t.co/J6vdSLr4hb

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

Instead of a thousand words.

Kyiv rescuers bow their heads near the body of their colleague, killed by Russia.

Three rescuers were killed by a second Russian strike as they rushed to save people.

[Stephen V Liu, MD @StephenVLiu]

This is a major story from #ASCO25. Randomized phase 3 trial of time of day of immunotherapy infusion. Randomized to infusion before or after 3pm. Early infusion far superior: PFS 11.3 vs 5.7 HR 0.42, OS HR 0.45! Impactful, pragmatic, not costly. This should be a bigger story.