Stefan Oliver

Dedicated to understanding the world through experiments, reasoning and logic. Any thoughts expressed via this account are not affiliated with any organization.

[Florian Krammer @florian_krammer]

1) Since there is a lot of confusion about the reduction of the overhead rate on NIH grants to 15% (see here: https://t.co/K8dtrCzDnj) I'll do a little tweetorial (or X-torial?) about it.

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@outbreakupdates An additional point. The epidemiology doesn't currently support this. As far as I'm aware, the only human cases of avian influenza linked to milk have been from raw milk and not pasteurized milk, which is produced in much larger quantities.

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@La_Galette56 @outbreakupdates Yes! Raw milk containing H5N1 kills...
https://t.co/jUpqgoco55

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@BillBailey Come to San Francisco!

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@LabDittmer @PacBio Totally random question, does this approach capture genome concatemers?

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@mbeisen I quite often see folk catching an Uber to the curb because they've parked so far away from it.

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@Peacetoday12 Timing of data availability, changes in concepts, technological advances in vaccine manufacture, and the age old factor in most scientific funding, politics.

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@Peacetoday12 I wouldn't call this strange as gK has been linked to HSV neuroinvasion for some time. Gus Kousoulasbhas published a number of papers on this topic. Given that neurons are the primary site of HSV latency targeting gK makes sense.

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

A huge loss for the virology community.

[CMM JHU @CMM_JHU]

Mourning the loss of Dr. Diane Griffin, who passed away on Monday.

Dr. Griffin was a founding member of @CMM_JHU and chaired our advisory board. A distinguished virologist, she was an elected member of Natl Acad Sci and Natl Acad Med. We remember her with gratitude.

[Frank Han MD 🇺🇦Pediatric/ACHD/GUCH Cardiologist @han_francis]

Dear Commitee, the ability to think differently on its own does not constitute a commitment to intellectual freedom. @DrJBhattacharya may have had different thoughts than most other people in the epidemiology community, but he is not a residency trained physician, nor is he formally trained in infectious disease (despite his numerous attempts to obfuscate his training). For example, I could claim that the Earth is flat, but that just makes me an idiot, not an innovator. While science does in fact thrive on debate, Bhattacharya’s actions at multiple points in time have constituted actively trying to harm the COVID response rather than trying to be a thoughtful contributor to COVID science. Examples:

In March 2020, Bhattacharya said “If it’s true that the novel Coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified”. In reality - COVID did kill millions worldwide, directly and indirectly, and Bhattacharya is still railing for less COVID restrictions and not thoughtfully assessing where he went wrong, or how his statements are being construed for an upcoming H5N1 epidemic.

On March 24 2020, he asserted in @WSJ that current estimates about the COVID-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude. Except, he never went back in 2021-2024 to reassess his mistakes. Bhattacharya according to himself, has always been right, which has never been a tenet of a successful scientist, libertarian, republican, democrat, or another political persuasion.

On August 7 2022, he asserted in Spike that “Ultimately, New Zealand’s COVID strategy was immoral, incoherent, and a grand failure”. He forgets that isolating the island nation helped them avoid the severe hospital overload that afflicted New York City, helped them avoid the large COVID spikes that afflicted every other nation (until their borders reopened), and helped a lot of Kiwis avoid suffering. These are not debatable just because someone is conservative, these are facts.

That you awarded him this honor in spite of all his extensive intellectual missteps is quite peculiar. Remember, the ability to think differently in and of itself doesn’t indicate genius.

I strongly recommend the committee thoroughly consider reading the book published by @19joho called “We Want them Infected”. The full panoply of Bhattacharya’s mistakes will be revealed.

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@RVirologist One person's winter is another person's summer.

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@RVirologist Always underrated insight. I thank you for your service

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@PabloVidalRibas @MicrobiomDigest Too many journals? I get about 50 requests a year to review a manuscript and, quite often, only given a week to do so. With my other duties it's just not possible. I doubt I'm alone in this. Also, has the pool of academic researchers increased, decreased, or remained the same?

[chiulab stanford @chiulab]

Missing Wedge Completion via Unsupervised Learning with Coordinate Networks

https://t.co/bNa47oLTCU

[Steve L. Bonilla @Steve_Bonilla]

Excited to share our short review on the challenges of applying single-particle cryo-EM to RNA structures and some of the methods developed to overcome them. Hope you find it useful! https://t.co/Hggg3CX7Ak

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

I am speaking at IHW 2024. Please check out my talk if you're attending the event! - via #Whova event app

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

Thrilled to announce AlphaFold 3 which can predict the structures and interactions of nearly all of life’s molecules with state-of-the-art accuracy including proteins, DNA and RNA. Biology is a complex dynamical system so modeling interactions is crucial https://t.co/Gs4GoOB3fD

[Stefan Oliver @dr_slo]

@cryomariena Challenge was excepted and software proved incorrect 😂